They are talking abut a tornado hitting the St. Louis airport. I got a feeling it might have been a microburst and not a tornado. The weather department will come out with a report soon.
“(CNN) -- Heavy winds from a severe storm caused significant damage, shattered windows and sent debris raining down on passengers at an airport in St. Louis Friday night.
The Lambert-St. Louis International Airport is closed indefinitely while officials investigate the damage, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay told reporters.
"There was a reported sighting of a tornado. Although that has not been confirmed, that storm caused significant damage to the airport," he said.
The reported tornado twisted metal and blew out plate-glass windows in the airport's main terminal, CNN affiliate KSDK reported.
Four people were transported to nearby hospitals with injuries, Slay said…”
The weather people can look at the radar and their data and they can tell by looking at the damage if it was a tornado or not. I have never seen a tornado but I have been on the edge or in a microburst.
It seems like we are having a lot of bad weather around the world. Is it just that the news reporting is better now? Or is mother nature trying to teach us a lesson?
Update 04/23/2011 Here is a comment from Dick in Kansas City, MO
"Did you see the chopper footage from STL - the homes near the airport? That might tilt more toward tonadic damage - some homes destroyed - none of the slabs wiped clean but walls down - not much remaining. Amazing no deaths - timely warnings and people heeded them apparently. Would be incredible to be in an airplace as some were when that hit.
I don't know of any cases where loaded aircraft on the ground has been hit by a tornado. The crew would feel helpless - they would be helpless. Nothing they could do other than maybe turn into the wind if they had time. It'd be a nightmare for a full scale hit by a tornado on a loaded aircraft on the ground or in the air. Terrible dilemma to see it coming - they probably did not since it's still not certain it was a tornado or if so if there was a visible funnel. In fact the lack of footage of a funnel is surprising at this point - thousands of cell phone cameras out there so if there was a visible funnel somebody has it on some device - or airport security cameras will have it."
Well, at this point it has all been sorted out and the story is not good. It was at its height an F-4 tornado; when it entered Lambert Field it was high-end F-2. There is video of the tornado hitting the airport taken from inside the terminal and there is no easily seen funnel cloud; the only photo taken showing a funnel was shot as the storm left the airport and that was caught in a lightning flash and it's a wide tube from the cloud deck to the earth. The terrible truth is that despite more than a half hour of sirens blowing and St. Louis and national media tracking the tornado from touchdown, and announcing where it would be at what time, Lambert continue its operations. The pilot of a landing aircraft encountered 80 mile an hour crosswinds. A plane loaded with passengers at a gate was lifted and moved vertically. Inside the terminal there was never a warning, only a person yelling "getting out" after people watching from large windows saw the plane at the gate moved. All the people could see was rain moving from right to left in a big circle. The fact seems to be that despite all the public warnings for 35 minutes the people in charge of the airport were simply unaware of what was going on. I fly in and out of Lambert all the time and it is a well-run airport and a pleasure to use. But what happened here, despite all sorts of explanations which don't stand up to much examination, simply should not have happened.
Posted by: Wayne Brasler | Friday, May 27, 2011 at 14:25