we will hear from fema regarding the disaster request. i imagine you have emergency operations center, you ve got video cameras and watching the weather alerts, on a personal level as you are watching this massive tornado role into these small towns and obliterate them, what are you thinking as you watch this on the cameras? in our executive staff that includes me, our executive director, deputy director, we were up all night monitoring and talking to each other and it was just, we could not leave it. devastation and when you get there this morning, you see it for yourself first hand, i lived through hurricane katrina, i went through that, i ve gone through tornadoes, i ve lived through it. this is probably some of the worst devastation i have seen from a tornado itself. the damage we saw today
injured than were injured in the tornado itself. 65 miles long, about a half a mile wide. that s almost 30 square miles worth of damage. and this thing very could easily be 150 miles per hour storm. 156 makes it a category five hurricane equivalent in the eye wall. that s how strong we are talking about, something hit down across the gulf coast earlier this year. i want to show you the purple sdwarz squares. this is yesterday. tornadoes on the ground. here comes the one very close there near columbus, georgia. there were more than ten tornado warnings at the same time for storms all rotating by themselves. when a line of storms lines up and we call it a squall line you get little tornadoes or wind damage. when you get storms all by themselves out there, that s
year that either hop from one community to the next. and one house is demolished. the one next door is untouched. then we ve seen damage like the one we saw in moore where communities are gone. how would you compare this tornado to those? how widespread is the damage? well, i m not actually sure how widespread the damage is. but the tornado itself, how long a track it was, it went tons of miles. and there are many tornadoes that are pretty long track and they re very strong. they re definitely front end tornadoes. so if these tornadoes were to go through heavy populated area they would cause damage as we saw from the moore tornado earlier this spring. wow, we re going to see more pictures as the sun comes up over nebraska. tornadoes like this, you say there s one that went for miles and then others, are they uncommon this time of year? they re very uncommon this
it now stands at 19. as for that tornado itself, it now has the terrible distinction of being the widest on record and one of the most powerful as well. chad myers is in el reno now, joins us. the tornado was upgraded today from an ef-3 to an ef-5. that really caught me by surprise. does that mean in terms of power? i mean, why was it upgraded? reporter: because doppler on wheels, scientists, storm chasers that we talk so much about, two teams of scientists with doppler on the back of pickup trucks spinning around found wind speeds of almost 300 miles per hour. now, those winds never hit anything. so we don t have houses that are missing because there s so much empty space here. but what we know, anderson, think about this. think about about a two-mile-wide carousel with horses going around and around. going around at 185 miles per hour. and then take those horses and spin them at 110 miles per hour. that s what this storm was doing. it had multiple vortices, or
and that caught a lot of people off guard who were around tracking the tornado. you know, i want to ask one more question. we have heard a lot about these rain-wrapped tornadoes. since last week when we were talking about all of this, is that unusual in the oklahoma area? caller: umm. it s not really unusual or usual. it happens with certain kinds of storms. that causes the rain-wrapped tornadoes. it seems like they have all been rain-wrapped tornados that we have been reporting on? caller: a lot of them have been. especially since the past week. basically, a lot of them have either gone rain wrapped or started out rain wrapped. but the moore tornado itself, it was not really rain wrapped for the majority of its life. but being rain-wrapped, they are a huge issue because it s it causes all of these safety