VIDEO: Kansas Had A Mile Wide Tornado This Week
We may be in the longest EF5 tornado drought, but Kansas may have broken that streak Tuesday night. Granted, we'll have to wait for the National Weather Service to inspect and classify the damage first. Welcome to Lawrence, Kansas. A small college town just West of Kansas City. With severe weather holding onto May as hard as it can, the skies produced a large tornado that created a path of damage almost fifty miles long. Luckily, most of Lawrence was spared. Yes, people lost their homes, some were injured, but for the most part, the entire populated area came out pretty well.
The size of this tornado hasn't been determined as of the time of writing this, though it's worth mentioning, the world hasn't experience a destructive EF5 tornado since the May 2013 storm that devastated Moore, OK, and it wasn't even the biggest tornado since then. Just a week later in 2013, a tornado ripped through the country between El Reno and Yukon, Oklahoma measured at over two and a half miles wide, and it was only rated at an EF3. That's because the "Enhanced Fujita Scale" is a measurement of damage, and the area that huge tornado ripped through was mostly farmland.
If you see some of the pictures out there, homes are largely destroyed, but the slabs haven't been swept clean, which is the calling card of the EF5 distinction. Given the destruction in path of this storm, while you can't rule out sections of EF5 damage yet to be surveyed, this enormous tornado will most likely be labeled EF4 for the bulk of its path.
Let's hope tornado season is winding down. Even though we had a record late start, there have been over 500 reported tornadoes in the last 30 days.
In case you don't know what to do if you encounter a tornado on the road, click here.
In any case, you don't want to do what these guys did... They drove straight into it.