Talk:1985 United States–Canada tornado outbreak

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41 or 43?[edit]

I have previously corrected the count to 43 in the text based on the table and linked references. However, a user changed it back to 41. It now is conflicting: 41 in text, 43 in table. If it is believed the references are wrong, please note that somewhere. If not, I will change the text to 43 again. NetJohn (talk) 18:17, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Inappropriate tone[edit]

A few phrases in this article caught my eye as inappropriate tone, so I tagged it as such. Here are a few examples:

  • ...it was a half-mile (0.8 km) wide monster packing winds estimated at 300 mph (480 km). (Remove all references to "monster" - really not an encyclopedic description. Sounds more like a sensationalistic weather reporter.)
  • The town resembled a bombed-out battlefield in the aftermath, and those were the exact words coming from the National Weather Service damage surveyors. (On the verge of being unencyclopedic - reword to state the authority which said this first, such as "The National Weather Service damage surveyors assessed the damage as...")
  • What may have been (arguably) one of the most impressive tornadic events of the 20th century also occurred during this outbreak. (Who argues this? Impressive how? Quantitatively? Impressive to whom?)
  • Nothing could stop this monster tornado (Monster, again, unencyclopedic. Also not needed in the context - of course nothing could stop it. This sounds more like a high school essay.)
  • The sheer amount of debris being wrought by this tornado was incredible... (Which authority said it was incredible? No need to sensationalize. Smells like an essay, not an encyclopedia.)

A cleanup of this and other problems with the tone would be appreciate. Cheers, --Rkitko (talk) 22:43, 13 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

    • Agreed. I've found and added a reference for one of these statements. The others I'll see what I can do.Davidals 20:41, 29 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Remerge the two articles?[edit]

Isn't the policy for a single system to have one article? Nature doesn't respect international borders. CrazyC83 (talk) 04:13, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The article states that 95% of Wheatland's residential and industrial area was destroyed. This cannot be right. Much damage was done to the industrial area but the major plants all survived. The residentail area that was destroyed was the poorest area in Wheatland and the local government invoked an old ordinance to forbid any house damaged over 50% of its value being repaired and conveniently ruled that the whole area was damaged more than that. Instant urban renewal. I don't know what percentage of Wheatland's residential areas was thus wiped out but i am fairly sure it was less than 50%. Areas outside of the wrecked area was mostly undamaged. I was several miles north of Wheatland when it happened and saw it up close the next week. Radio Sharon (talk) 23:13, 20 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

UTC times[edit]

The UTC times cited in the article for Ontario seems to be 2 hours ahead of the real times when compared to the local times mentionned in the text and with the Tornado History Project used in reference. The time in this area in May is Eastern Daylight saving time which is UTC - 4 not -6. Pierre cb (talk) 13:55, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Dead link[edit]

During several automated bot runs the following external link was found to be unavailable. Please check if the link is in fact down and fix or remove it in that case!

--JeffGBot (talk) 11:53, 7 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Merge with 1985 Barrie tornado outbreak[edit]

I am currently looking into getting 1985 Barrie tornado outbreak merged into this article. The discussion has already started here. TornadoLGS (talk) 02:23, 29 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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Ridiculously small image[edit]

This image... can we not do this? Is there a larger image?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:VIS_SAT_1985_MAY_31_sm.gif

-173.187.77.148 (talk) 22:18, 20 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Put Canada first[edit]

Should the section discussing the Canadian tornadoes be listed before the U.S. section? Canada was impacted first in this event, and the only reason I than think of that the U.S. tornadoes are discussed first is the general U.S.-centric tendency of tornado articles. TornadoLGS (talk) 22:03, 24 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I would have done this today - I completely agree with your assessment of things - but I'm concerned about somehow interrupting the flow of the original article. Since I (unfortunately) don't have time to rewrite the whole article at the moment, this will have to wait a bit. Dym75 (talk) 21:30, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Damage totals are all over the place[edit]

First of all, the $750M damage total listed with the Niles-Wheatland part of the article is incredibly wrong.

Before 1996, codes of 0 to 9 were used with estimated damage totals on Storm Data, etc, reports. The numeric meaning of these codes ranged from unknown (0) to < $50 (1), $50-$500 (2), $500-$5K (3), $5K-$50K (4), $50K-$500K (5), $500K-$5M (6), $5M-$50M (7), $50M-$500M (8), and - finally - >$500M (9). When entered into the online database from the original reports, an "average" was used so each category from (2)-(8) became $250, $2.5K, $25K, $250K, $2.5M, $25M, $250M. That said, the $50M-$500M range was "averaged" out to $250M. The person who created this section of the article multiplied the $250M by three based on three different listings (separated by counties affected) in the NCDC database and cited them accordingly; however, while the OH listings both read $250M, the listing for the PA county shows $250K. This is only one problem. [BTW, if you need confirmation of how this works, refer to a document you can find online called "SPC_severe_database_description.pdf"]

Of note, the Wheatland page from NWS State College (weather.gov/cpt/Wheatland) shows that damage on the Ohio end of the tornado totaled $60M+ but there's no indication of the damage total in Pennsylvania. The Outbreak page on the NWS Cleveland website (weather.gov/cle/event_19850531_85outbreak) doesn't offer any information about damage amounts in either state.

At the top of the article, the damage total for the entire outbreak is listed as $1.27 billion in 2019 dollars. The correct format for these articles about tornadoes and outbreaks requires the original damage total for the year of the event - in this case, 1985 - then using the inflation coding to bring the amount to current. By using a reverse inflation calculator (data supplied by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), this $1.27 billion (2019) is actually about $510M in 1985 USD. I cannot find anything anywhere that would support this so I deleted that number.

In the last paragraph of the section titled "Storm Timeline and Aftermath," total U.S. damages for the entire outbreak are listed as $600M in 2010 dollars which conflicts with the 2019 total at the top of the article and makes the possible totals even more unclear. The article on the Outbreak from the NWS State College page (weather.gov/cpt/TornadoOutbreak_May311985) shows $600M but doesn't indicate this is 2010 USD. I also have no idea what the CAD damage totals are or how USD was calculated from that. As a result of this, I deleted that section of the paragraph.

I even checked the CDC since they did a MMWR on this outbreak the following year, but there was no indication of damage totals there (understandably).

Hopefully, someone knows where to find more accurate figures for these damage totals. Dym75 (talk) 21:28, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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