The Tornado That Invented the F-Scale

May 11, 1970. A tornado bends a twenty story steel tower in downtown Lubbock, Texas. Twenty-six people dead. Fifteen square miles gone. Then somebody asks how strong it was, and nobody on Earth can answer. In 1970 there was no scale for tornadoes. No categories, no ratings, no F anything. Ted Fujita arrived the day after with a camera and a plane. He mapped the wreckage house by house, spotted curved scars from the air that nobody on the ground had seen, and found that ninety-six percent of the deaths lay along them. A year later he published the F-Scale. Then the scale rated the storm that made it, and Lubbock became the first F5 in history. Every F and EF number you have ever heard was cut from these ruins. #LubbockTornado #FujitaScale #TornadoHistory #WeatherDocumentary #TexasHistory