Template talk:10 costliest US tornadoes
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[edit] Accuracy
Is this list accurate? Is it original research? I note the 1989 Huntsville tornado [1] with a reported damage total of $250 million. How does this not make the list? I think this needs explanation of methods for calculating the top ten list. - Dravecky (talk) 13:50, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
- It looks like you may be right. I'll bring this up with the primary creator of this list. Gopher backer (talk) 19:21, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
- The cited source was Brooks and Doswell, 2001 (which I added a formal citation for), if that is the case, then it should be accurate up to 1999, which includes Huntsville 1989. This should not be a problem, since $250 million for adjusted damages is less than the #10 tornado on this template's list. I've not checked to confirm that the Wikipedia data is from that paper. There's also the matter of the wealth normalization. Evolauxia (talk) 00:47, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
- The $250 million is raw 1989 dollars, unadjusted to 1997. The original source does include 1989 Huntsville but the raw damage is $100 million. Barring another source additional to Storm Data for the higher raw amount, I suggest sticking with Brooks and Doswell's figures. Evolauxia (talk) 17:16, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
- I posted this on the talk page of the guy who asked the question, figured I'd post it here as well. The source is a bit old (1999) but it is up-to-date, as of last year. The reason you see Huntsville Alabama as $250 million is because the old system for official tornado records was from the days when computer space was very limited, so damage "tiers" were thought up so that the damage of a tornado could be recorded as just one number. There were several tiers, 0, 250, 2500, 25000, 250000 dollars etc. Thus the $250 million figure you see for Huntsville is just the closest tier to the actual amount of damage, which was around $100 million (see November 1989 Tornado Outbreak). -RunningOnBrains 08:49, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
- The $250 million is raw 1989 dollars, unadjusted to 1997. The original source does include 1989 Huntsville but the raw damage is $100 million. Barring another source additional to Storm Data for the higher raw amount, I suggest sticking with Brooks and Doswell's figures. Evolauxia (talk) 17:16, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
- The cited source was Brooks and Doswell, 2001 (which I added a formal citation for), if that is the case, then it should be accurate up to 1999, which includes Huntsville 1989. This should not be a problem, since $250 million for adjusted damages is less than the #10 tornado on this template's list. I've not checked to confirm that the Wikipedia data is from that paper. There's also the matter of the wealth normalization. Evolauxia (talk) 00:47, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
[edit] New data
Since I first made this list, it seems that there were actually two tornadoes last year with $250 million in damage: The Enterprise tornado and the Greensburg tornado. I'm looking to find independent sources to make sure these are actually 250 mil and not the fake kind. Even so, they would not make the list, although I'm interested to see damage figures from some of those Super Tuesday tornadoes.-RunningOnBrains 08:55, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
- The actual damage from Enterprise was $307 million and falling just short of the list. Greensburg I believe was in the $160-200M range, but I am not sure exactly as that was an early estimate (the $250M was used in the article for the lack of a better estimate). CrazyC83 (talk) 17:44, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
