It is known as the “Candlestick Park” tornado, named after a shopping center in south Jackson, MS, which was completely destroyed. Per the SPC, the path length was 202.5 miles. It moved through portions of MS and then into AL. The maximum width was 900 yards. There were 518 injuries, and 58 fatalities reported—57 deaths in MS and 1 in AL.
Discrepancies:
We gathered the information for this event from the SPC & NCDC Databases, the March 1966 Storm Data Narrative, Thomas Grazulis in Significant Tornadoes, and from a detailed summary from the NWS Jackson, MS.
The main discrepancies with this event are:
- Was this a single path or a family of tornadoes?
- What counties should be included in the path?
- There are no counties listed in the SPC database because the tornado crossed state lines, so I plotted the official beginning and ending path points provided by the SPC and drew a straight line from start to end. This gave me an idea of the counties which should be in the path. Those counties are as follows:
MS: Hinds, Rankin, Scott, Leake, Neshoba, Kemper, Noxubee
AL: Pickens, Tuscaloosa
- I tried to grab all of the NCDC entries for each county in the path to see if I could fine-tune the track. The NCDC entries are not complete. There is no entry for Scott, Neshoba, Kemper, or Noxubee Counties in MS. The timestamps are incorrect. Pickens and Tuscaloosa counties are listed as occurring before Leake County, MS, for example.
- I compared what I had found so far with Storm Data. They had an entry that listed all of the counties in MS except Noxubee. They mention the tornado traveled 50 miles in Alabama. There is a separate entry for Pickens & Tuscaloosa, but you would not know that it was considered a part of this major tornado by reading it.
- Grazulis has an entry for Hinds, Rankin, Scott, and Leake, MS. He states this may have been a family of tornadoes and lists the path length as 75 miles. He has a separate entry for Pickens/Tuscaloosa as an F2 tornado.
- Finally, one of the best resources for figuring out where/how this tornado tracked was with the NWS Jackson summary. You can find that here. Below the map, I present their analysis of this devastating F5 tornado’s movement and the damage that occurred.
0 Comments