kim klockow mcclain: the survivors i ve spoken with, they just experience what feels like a building dissolving. one minute i was in a building and the next minute i just wasn t. like a bomb has hit it. it s obliterated. [ominous music] derek vaughan: so at its maximum intensity, the peak winds were up to 190 miles per hour. that s enough to just destroy anything in its path. nothing can stand up to that. you knew people were gonna lose their lives that night. once the tornado approached mayfield, it came in from the southwest side of town. derek vaughan: i had a few officers on shift with me that night. we had decided that we were gonna go ahead and meet at the police department. the services all started going down suddenly. the power in the entire town went off. and of course, when that happened,
being a number of storms that produce tornadoes from central mississippi eastward through alabama. and many of those storms produced multiple tornadoes. just in the state of alabama there were 62 tornadoes that hit that day. seems that every hour that passes today, the news out of the south just gets worse. kim klockow mcclain: after the alabama outbreak, there was kind of a renaissance in our field because we hadn t experienced an event that deeply catastrophic in so long. there were hundreds of fatalities, and we hadn t lost that many people in a tornado outbreak since 1974. storm chaser: oh my god. harold brooks: one of the silver linings of the april 27 outbreak was an understanding that we need to do a whole lot more work on social science with respect
so it can actually accelerate the wind speeds. so you re putting yourself in greater danger. kim klockow mcclain: there s a really popular misconception that mobile homes are like tornado attractors, and what s behind that is undoubtedly that people hear about mobile homes getting hit more because that s where people die. harold brooks: roughly half of the deaths in tornadoes occur in mobile and manufactured homes. they re much more vulnerable to a tornado and tend to turn into debris quicker. there are myths that tornadoes can t cross bodies of water. oh, tornadoes can t go through cities. jeff piotrowski: but there are no rules when it comes to tornadoes. they go where they wanna go. harold brooks: the deadliest tornado in us history is march 18, 1925, the tri-state tornado that went across southeastern missouri, southern illinois into southwestern indiana, and it
when a tornado is going through a densely wooded area, you can smell the fresh cut wood, the fresh cut pine, whatever the tree is. paul markowski: the typical widths are anywhere from probably 25 to 50 yards across on the low end to, on the high end, a mile wide. tim marshall: the largest one i ve ever seen was the el reno, oklahoma tornado, and that was over two miles wide. kim klockow mcclain: the joplin tornado became a mile wide wedge right on the edge of town. kat piotrowski: the tornado was massive. it was chewing up everything in its path. there was no mercy at all.
it s going to be 20 minutes before the tornado arrives, many people will look out their window and see that it s still blue skies. the storm hasn t gotten there yet, and either they think they have more time than they do or they think the storm isn t really going to hit them. so there is such a thing as too much lead time. also what they re studying is how people react to the warning they re given. kim klockow mcclain: fear is a really challenging component of this entire equation. there has been no example i ve seen that is clearer of this fear effect than what happened in oklahoma in 2013. on may 20, we had the tornado that went through oklahoma city and moore and killed 24 people, including several children at a school. and after that, we had just days and days of storms and everyone was just on edge.