DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Fujita Scale, right here in Lubbock County. Now, most folks hear the word 'tornado' and they think wind. Screaming, howling, unstoppable wind.
But for a long time, nobody really had a reliable way to measure just how fast that wind was blowing inside a twister — because by the time you could get close enough to check, the tornado had already made its opinion pretty clear. That's the problem Dr. Tetsuya Theodore Fujita set out to solve.
Dr. Fujita — Ted, to those who knew him — was born in 1920 and lived until 1998. He began studying tornadoes and thunderstorms in the late 1940s, starting at the Kyushu Institute of Technology in Japan, and eventually making his way to the University of Chicago.
Now, here's a man who understood that if you want to know what a tornado did, you go look at what it left behind. And look he did. From 1965 to 1991, Dr.
Fujita visited more than three hundred tornado sites. Three hundred. That is a man with a mission and a very sturdy vehicle.
But of all those sites, one proved especially significant in confirming his data — the 1970 Lubbock tornado. May 11, 1970. That night, Lubbock found out firsthand what 'incredible damage' means.
The tornado that struck this city became the real-world confirmation of the upper end of the scale Dr. Fujita was building — what he would eventually classify as F5. Shortly after his visit to Lubbock, he published what the world would come to know as the Fujita Scale.
The scale itself was a combination of two existing frameworks — the Beaufort Wind Force Scale and the Mach Number Scale — woven together into something new. It worked by reading the wreckage. What did the storm leave standing?
What did it carry off entirely? From that, you could work backward to the wind. F0 at one end: light damage.
F5 at the other end: incredible damage. The Lubbock tornado had already provided the proof. The meteorology community and the National Weather Service didn't wait long.
Shortly after its introduction, they adopted the Fujita Scale as the standard way of describing tornadoes after the fact. For decades, it did the job. But science, like a good Texas storm, keeps moving.
The Fujita Scale had limitations. It didn't account for structural integrity — meaning a poorly built structure and a well-built one might show wildly different damage from the same wind, and that could be misleading. Something had to give.
In 2000, researchers from Texas Tech University's Institute for Disaster Research got to work studying ways to improve the scale. Six years later, in 2006, they submitted their findings to the National Weather Service. And on February 1, 2007, the Enhanced Fujita Scale was officially adopted.
The new version added metrics for the quality of construction and the economic impact of damages — making it a sharper, more honest instrument. Other countries have since adopted the Enhanced Fujita Scale, or their own modified versions of the original. It keeps doing what Dr.
Fujita always intended: helping people understand the storm, build smarter against it, and plan for the next time the sky decides to make a point. Lubbock knows better than most — some storms leave more than destruction behind. Sometimes they leave knowledge.
And knowledge, unlike a rooftop in a twister, tends to stick around.
What the marker says
The Fujita Scale is a tool used to estimate wind speed by looking at the damage tornadoes cause. It was developed by Dr. Tetsuya Theodore (Ted) Fujita (1920-1998), who began studying tornadoes and thunderstorms in the late 1940s at the Kyushu Institute of Technology in Japan and later at the University of Chicago. While Dr. Fujita visited more than 300 sites from 1965 to 1991, the 1970 Lubbock tornado was significant in confirming his data. Shortly after his visit, he published the Fujita Scale. A combination of the Beaufort Wind Force Scale and the Mach Number Scale, categories on the scale determined wind speed as seen by the damage left behind. F0 tornadoes were described as ‘light damage’ while F5 tornadoes were ‘incredible damage,’ as confirmed by the May 11, 1970, Lubbock Tornado. Shortly after its introduction, the National Weather Service and the meteorology community adopted the Fujita Scale as a means of describing tornadoes after the fact. Although the Fujita Scale was widely used, it had limitations. The scale did not take structural integrity into account and damage could be misleading. In 2000, researchers from Texas Tech University’s Institute for Disaster Research began to study ways to improve the Fujita Scale. In 2006, the researchers submitted their findings to the National Weather Service. The result was the Enhanced Fujita Scale, adopted on February 1, 2007. The new scale added metrics for the quality of construction and economic impact from damages. Other countries have adopted the Enhanced Fujita Scale or modified versions of the original. It continues to be a valuable tool for identifying safer construction methods and materials, as well as planning for severe weather events. (2020)