i ve seen ones before like i ve seen the joplin one which was kind of wrapped in rain and i ve seen the battle one in 2010 in south dakota. this is up there with the real violent stuff. chris, how close do you let this thing get to you before you back away? this one got to within a half to three-quarters of a mile. at that point, i started to back away. do you feel something when you re there? the wind? is there rain? help us understand what that is like. it s kind of an indescribable feeling. your ears are popping and you feel the ground shaking like in the case yesterday. a little vibration in the ground. like a very cloud waterfall basically. kind of like if you re standing at niagara falls. about that same sound. it does sound like a train too. now what we are seeing now it looked as though we saw something light on popping in the middle of the tornado. would that have been the power lines that it hit?
different tornadoes that wasn t from one single tornado like this one. and here just to show you the comparisons, you ll hear about this probably for the next week or two, the comparisons in moore, oklahoma, they were hit by two ef-4/ef-5 tornadoes. haven t gotten the official rating on the one that happened on your monday afternoon. but the green line there is the one from 1999, imagine that, an ef-5, only had ten going back the last 14 years and then below that is the one, the red line is the one that happened monday afternoon. they literally crisscrossed each other. one went through the northern portions of moore, the other went through the southern portions. they literally have had to rebuild all of moore oklahoma because of these two tornadoes. the odds are just astronomical against two tornadoes that a strong hitting it. probably like hitting the power ball twice. just crazy that it happened. all right. bill karins, thank you so much for the very latest. and of course we hope t
possibility that our dallas station there, i m sure they will have their helicopter up in the air. and if we get another tornado on the ground, we ll bring it to you live right here. and then from this point, the storms will be trekking in a northeasterly direction and again, the possibility of tornadoes into the early evening hours all through this area in red. so pretty incredible stuff. and here s how the history books are looking right now. these are the deadliest u.s. tornadoes, most of these all happened before the age of technology where we could get advanced warnings out. joplin one was amazing because it was the highest total since 1947. and joplin, we had 158 fatalities. we re hearing now right now officially 51 from moore. looking like that could go up almost to the triple digits which would put it in the top 20 all-time for fatalities from a tornado, from a single tornado in the u.s.. i know a lot of people down there in the southeast are saying when you had your event back
the one that we saw today wempbt through the southern portions. so within 15 years, the north side was destroyed and now the south side was destroyed. how is this looking as far as deadliest tornadoes in our country s history? look at the date on a lot of these. it s before we had tv. mostly before we had radio, in some cases. they were talking before 1950 when they had very little warning. but in the modern era, the joplin one, two years ago, was 158 in fatalities. so here s how we are tonight.
a, quote, incredible tornado. it was the afternoon of may 3rd, 1999 when an f-5 tornado crossed into moore, oklahoma. you can see the devastation that tornado wrought when it hit 14 years ago. the mayor today was also the same mayor back then. he said today s storm followed much the same path as that huge one in 1999 and that everybody still just calls may 3rd. the 1999 may 3rd tornado was an f-5. winds at over 300 miles an hour. that may have generated the highest winds ever recorded on the face of the earth. that tornado in 1999 gnawed a path through town three quarters of a mile wide, killed 36 people across four counties. this map shows the path of that huge tornado that hit moore in 1999. that s the path in green. in 2003, there was another major tornado that took roughly the same path, the one marked in blue. and now today, today s storm following almost the exact same