What Facebook, Blue Jeans, and Metal Signs Taught Us About Tornado Science
On April 27, 2011 a monstrous EF5 tornado traveled 132 miles across northern Alabama and into southern Tennessee, missing one of the nation’s largest nuclear power plants by less than two miles, and also skirting the grounds of an Alabama state prison and obliterating the Alabama towns of Hackleburg and Phil Campbell. In Hackleburg, the tornado destroyed 75 percent of the structures, killed 18 people and crumpled a Wrangler blue jeans plant.
The jeans were syphoned up into the air, and somewhere in the anvil of the thunderstorm that had spawned
