Lost And Found: Tornadoes Have Been Known To Blow Things To 200 Miles Away

The southern and central Plains tornado outbreak at the end of April carried debris incredible distances, as people keep finding more and more pieces from wrecked homes in Oklahoma, Nebraska and Iowa. 

This photo was found about 20 miles from a home it was
blown out of during tornadoes last week in Nebraska.

In Nebraska a family photo was found 75 miles away from their destroyed Nebraska home and returned to them. A tattered photograph was found 20 miles away from its demolished source home. A woman in Owassa, Oklahoma found a baseball card in good condition on her front porch that was blown from a tornado in Holdenville, Oklahoma, 106 mils to the south. 

The woman is working on returning the baseball card to its owner.

This kind of thing is nothing new.  Debris from tornadoes can travel incredible distances as that stuff is lofted up sometimes 10,000 feet or more into the parent thunderstorm.

Supercell thunderstorms, which produce the tornadoes, can travel a few hundred miles before weakening and depositing small bits of debris far from where the original tornado touched down. 

In the 1990s, the University of Oklahoma School of Meteorology had a tornado debris project, where they sought "traceable" debris, such as canceled checks, photographs with names, bank papers, legal documents, invoices and such to understand how debris lofted into the air by tornadoes travels.

The researchers found stuff blown by tornadoes incredible distances, sometimes well over 100 miles.  

A powerful tornado destroyed most of Barneveld, Wisconsin back in 1984. Papers traceable to Barneveld were found as much as 110 miles away. Heavier objects weighing more than one pound, such as pieces of plywood and boards were found up to 85 miles away. 

The super outbreak of intense tornado on April 27, 2011 yielded some of the longest distances traveled by debris, reported the Weather Channel in a 2015 article. A metal sign, about four feet tall and three feet wide, was swept out of a school by an EF-5 tornado - the most powerful type of twister.

 Later, a man found the sign in his Russellville, Alabama yard. Russellville is about 50 miles from Smithfield. The sign probably weighed at least four or five pounds.  

Even more impressive, a person's windbreaker jacket was swept away from Hacklesburg, Alabama and later found 68 miles away.  It's the furthest distance known of an object weighing at least one pound being carried that far. 

I'm guessing there's examples of objects like that carried further. But chances are they were never found, having landed in some remote place. Or somebody who found the object was just dumped there by a careless local person. 

In the same tornado outbreak, a photograph landed in Tennessee, 220 miles from its source.

Researchers got interested in a Facebook page set up after that 2011 tornado outbreak to help unite tornado victims with precious momentos. Her page ended with 1,700 tornado-strewn objects back in the hands of their owners. 

That research helped scientists study wind patterns in tornadic thunderstorms. To nobody's surprise, most of the items were found were taken aloft by the strongest EF-5 tornadoes. The tornadoes' parent thunderstorms were moving toward the northeast, and many of the lighter objects, such as paper. landed a little to the right of the storms; paths. 

If, Gawd forbid, a tornado strikes a nuclear or hazardous biological facility, the debris tracing can help scientists understand who might be at risk downstream from a tornado.

Similar Facebook pages to the one set up after the April 27, 2011 outbreak  have been set up after the Plains tornado disaster, so that might be another opportunity for researcher.