Evansville Area Tornado
On Sunday, November 6, 2005 at around 1:50 am CST (0750 UTC), a tornado touched down 2 miles (3 km) north-northwest of Smith Mills in Henderson County, Kentucky, near the Indiana/Kentucky border, and then crossed the Ohio River into Vanderburgh County, Indiana. Staying just south of I-164, the tornado traveled to the northeast causing extensive damage to parts of Evansville, Newburgh, and Boonville. The tornado lifted in Spencer County, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) south-southwest of Gentryville. According to a damage survey done by the National Weather Service office in Paducah, Kentucky the damage path was at least 400 yards (365 m) wide and 41 miles (66 km) long. The tornado's maximum wind speed was estimated to be 200 mph (320 km/h), making it a high-end F3 on the Fujita scale.
Tornado warnings were in effect at the time and issued on average about 30 minutes before the tornado hit, but few people were alerted as many were asleep as the tornado hit in the overnight hours. The local NOAA Weather Radio transmitter was experiencing technical difficulties at the time, causing some weather radios to not sound an alarm. The tornado killed 25 people; two of the victims died from injuries more than a month after the storm. Damages were estimated at around $85 million.
Ellis Park Racecourse, (a horse racing facility between Henderson and Evansville), was directly hit by the tornado. The track suffered heavy damage; 11 of its 38 barns were destroyed and another 11 were damaged, and several of their racehorses were killed. Extensive tree damage also occurred in the area as the tornado leveled a swath of forests. The worst damage occurred in the southeast side of Evansville, where the Eastbrook Mobile Home Park suffered extreme damage from the tornado. Among the 350 trailers in the park, over 100 were flattened and another 125 were severely damaged. Twenty people were killed in the park and another 230 were injured. Electricity service was cut for over 25,000 customers in the area after the tornado hit.
Severe damage was also reported in Warrick County, where five more people died. The communities of Paradise, DeGonia Springs, Newburgh, Boonville, and Tennyson all sustained major damage, including houses damaged or destroyed, as a result.
Read more about this topic: Evansville Tornado Of November 2005
Famous quotes containing the words area and/or tornado:
“Prosperous farmers mean more employment, more prosperity for the workers and the business men of ... every industrial area in the whole country.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“The sumptuous age of stars and images is reduced to a few artificial tornado effects, pathetic fake buildings, and childish tricks which the crowd pretends to be taken in by to avoid feeling too disappointed. Ghost towns, ghost people. The whole place has the same air of obsolescence about it as Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)