Springfield, Illinois is continuing to clean up after the Sunday night tornadoes. I was finally able to get to the post office yesterday. I had to get there by taking a long way around as Chatham Road was still closed. I took a few pictures, although you can't really see much of the damage in them.
This is a glass company with broken glass all over their building.
The florist may be enchanted, but it didn't save their roof.
I had plenty of time to take pictures on Wabash as the traffic wasn't going anywhere.
Behind the red truck on the other side of the street is a veterinary office that was basically destroyed. I hope if there were any animals there that they weren't hurt. Our own vet office was also near the path but appeared undamaged.
This week I did a little net surfing about tornadoes. Wikipedia has an excellent article about tornadoes. There is a list of important historic tornadoes here.
I have been near two tornadoes in my life. The first was on April 3, 1974 in Decatur, Illinois. That is the date of the largest recorded outbreak of tornadoes in history. It is called the Super Outbreak. There is an entire web site devoted to the super outbreak of tornadoes at april31974.com. It lists all of the 148 tornadoes that day. It looks like they are numbered in chronological order. The Decatur tornado was #5. It was an F3 that was on the ground for 19 miles, going about a mile west of the school I was in at the time.
The tornado of March 12, 2006 came a little closer, going less than a mile north of our house. This was also a large outbreak of 73 tornadoes, and it now has its own Wikipedia entry. The Springfield tornadoes have their own section.
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