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Talk:Tornado outbreaks of mid-to-late May, 1896

Latest comment: 1 month ago by Lavabite in topic How many tornado outbreaks were there?
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Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:April 1880 tornado outbreak which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 08:03, 23 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

Might have started earlier

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Latest comment: 6 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

After doing research on another subject that happened in 1896, I came across a newspaper article about nasty tornadoes that struck in Kansas and Nebraska on May 12th and 13th. I came here to see if there was any information on those tornadoes and came across this article. I do not know how to edit or add to these articles with info boxes. Here is the newspaper page that has information on the Kansas and Nebraska storms. http://westunion.advantage-preservation.com/viewer/?i=f&by=1896&bdd=1890&bm=5&bd=20&d=05201896-05201896&fn=the_argo_usa_iowa_west_union_18960520_english_2&df=1&dt=8 Jack Bee Nimble (talk)Jack Bee Nimble —Preceding undated comment added 00:17, 19 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

My copy of Significant Tornadoes lists the Kansas and Minnesota tornadoes as occurring on May 11 but does not mention a tornado in Nebraska for any of these dates. From the description in the newspaper you link to, it seems likely that the event in Lincoln was a downburst rather than a tornado. Either way, the gap in time is large enough not to count these as part of the same outbreak sequence. TornadoLGS (talk) 18:44, 19 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

Someone removed the Sherman texas and falls city tornadoes

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Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion

someone needs to put them back up, Also, To whoever did this, please don’t do this again 184.178.82.99 (talk) 01:07, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

How many tornado outbreaks were there?

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Latest comment: 1 month ago9 comments3 people in discussion

The question above is more a hook than anything. When I made my big update to this page, I knew this would eventually need to be split up, because this never was an outbreak sequence (as was claimed for years), and poor management of this article warranted a heavy modified revert due to enormous amounts of deleted information (never good for an encyclopedia). This discussion I’m making is so we can figure out what to do with this article, because there isn’t precedent I can find for a situation like this (many years of incorrect sorting on a tornado outbreak article pre-1950s) about what to do when something like this happens. Using Tornado Archive, I’ve made a list of days during this rough time period (around May 1896) of the tornadoes each day to gauge how many articles (tornado outbreak pages), this should be split into.

April 30: Nothing

May 1: Nothing

May 2: Nothing

May 3: Nothing

May 4: Nothing

May 5: Nothing

May 6: Nothing

May 7: Nothing

May 8: 1 F3| South Dakota F3 (1 killed)

May 9: Nothing

May 10: Nothing

May 11: Nothing

May 12: 1 F3|5 F2

May 13: 1 F2 (Texas)

May 14: Nothing

May 15: 1 F5|1 F3|4 F2| Texas F3 (2 killed), Texas F2 (3 killed), Texas F5 (73 killed, high end F5), Oklahoma F2 (4 killed), Kansas F2 (1 killed)

May 16: Nothing

May 17: 1 F5|1 F3|1 F2| Kansas—Nebraska F5 (25 killed, >2mi wide, destroyed Reserve, KS), Kansas F3 (60 injuries), Kentucky F2 (5 killed)

May 18: 1 F2 (Iowa)

May 19: 1 F3 (Kansas)

May 20: 1 F3|3 F2|5 FU

May 21: Nothing

May 22: Nothing

May 23: Nothing

May 24: 1 F4|1 F2| Iowa F4 (21 killed), Iowa F2 (Maybe 1 killed)

May 25: 1 F5|1 F4|4 F3|3 F2| Illinois F4 (4 killed), Illinois F3 (3 killed), Michigan F3 (1 killed), Michigan F3 (2 killed), Michigan F5 (47 killed, MI 2nd most ever)

May 26: Nothing

May 27: 4 F4|4 F3|2 F2| Missouri F2 (1 killed), Missouri F3 (6-7 killed), Missouri F4 (2 killed), Missouri—Illinois F4 (255 killed, costliest in US history when normalized), Illinois F4 (14 killed), Illinois F4 (24 killed), Illinois F3 (3 killed)

May 28: 1 F3|3 F2| Pennsylvania F2 (1 killed), Pennsylvania—New Jersey F3 (4 killed)

May 29: Nothing

May 30: 1 F2 (Colorado)

May 31: Nothing

June 1: Nothing

June 2: Nothing

June 3: Nothing

June 4: Nothing

June 5: Nothing

These are the tornado dates in UTC, so slightly misleading at times, but generally a good guideline I think. It is first the count of each tornado by rating, then for tornadoes with a fatality or many injuries (generally), I included the state and occasionally extra information beyond number of fatalities/injuries to the right.

When it comes to tornado outbreaks this old, the undercount of tornadoes in outbreaks are extreme, very evident from the fact that 3 F5 tornadoes happened in mid-to-late May with less than 40 other tornadoes recorded in that time-span. I personally think we should split it into “Tornado outbreak sequence of May 15-20, 1896” and “Tornado outbreak sequence of May 24-28, 1896”. This goes against the rules applied for what is considered an outbreak sequence for contemporary (or even 1910s) tornado outbreaks, but I personally feel the undercount in the 19th century to be enough that it is reasonable that some F2 tornadoes occurred in rural areas on May 16 and May 26, judged by the 2 F5 tornadoes one day apart and the 2 & 4 violent tornadoes a day apart, therefore fulfilling the criteria. One piece of evidence is if you take away the population of Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania (most populous states outside Tornado or Dixie Alley in 1890) from the 1890 US Census, you get a population of only ~45 million, which is under a quarter of the amount (~200 million) in the 2020 US Census if you took out those same states plus California, Florida, North Carolina, New Jersey, Virginia, Washington, and Arizona (Which completes the list for all states more populous than Massachusetts in the USA in 2020 outside Tornado or Dixie Alley).

If we do go by the modern applied definition, it would be split up into “Tornado outbreak of May 15, 1896”, “Tornado outbreak of May 17-20, 1896”, “Tornado outbreak of May 24-25, 1896”, and “Tornado outbreak of May 27-28, 1896”. All these tornado outbreaks (except maybe May 17-20) are notable enough to get their own Wikipedia page I believe, but lumping some of them together into the same article I think would be of better encyclopedic value.


I do not know how to create a poll/vote on Wikipedia, but I would like to hold one to choose how we should take care of splitting up the article, because the last time this happened without discussion, this page turned into just the St. Louis tornado “outbreak sequence” (May 24-28), deleting half of the work and multiple F5 tornadoes and their information without a new page being made for them and their respective outbreaks, leading to a huge modified revert leading us to where we are now.

@EF5: I’m pinging you since you were the one who originally left the cleanup message at the top. What do you think we should do?

@Departure–: I’m pinging you because you are a veteran tornado wiki contributor, and helping fix a page about a string of extremely violent tornadic events might interest you. Also, you left welcome message on my talk page when I started editing tornado wikis.

Lavabite (talk) 02:15, 17 May 2026 (UTC)Reply

The fact is, the definition of a tornado outbreak that Wikipedia uses and the one everyone else in the world uses differ. Even something seemingly innocuous like last year's Tornado outbreak of May 15–16, 2025 was actually two outbreaks, and my attempt to get it labeled a sequence was shot down the day it happened. This is a problem I've been dreading having to deal with, given a complete collapse of will to edit weather articles the past few months (coming on a year, if I'm being honest), and one that (as much as I hate to say it) the stubborn mentality of a lot of Wikipedia contributors (myself included) have towards this kind of thing--we have a hundred years' prior consensus as to what an outbreak is on Wikipedia, we've "always done it like this", and the fact that at this point in time Wikipedia has become the foremost source for weather reporting and documentation means we kind of get to make the rules, and years-old consensus by non-experts gets weighed over what everyone else in the world says.
That, and sources are straight up hard to find to justify a lot of these (really, I'd venture a guess more than half of the prose on Wikipedia for tornadoes before 1980 is sourced either directly or indirectly to Grazulis), and that articles take a lot of time and effort in short supply in the weather community (except on the EF5 tornado going through downtown Whoville as I write this).
I think it's far past time for a wider-scale discussion at WP:WPWX about dealing with these unfairly grouped outbreaks, with wider community participation outside the realm of weather--though I don't want to be the one starting more drama than I've already gotten in to, with my lack of motivation already in full swing. As for the case-by-case and splitting this specifically, yeah, this is a relic of a time before community scrutiny to the level we have on contemporary tornado events, with not nearly enough daily views/eyes on it regularly for anyone to raise much of a fuss and think "hold on, why do we have this article in the first place?" and I'm not surprised one of these exists (and am honestly half-shocked there isn't more of a concerted drive to do this elsewhere, but at the end of the day, it's nerd-paperwork--and never going to be as enthralling as writing an article on a recent tornado).
I'd support splitting this one up. Really, this should be the month article (but again, there is a serious lack of "List of tornadoes in May YYYY" for anything before, say, 1990, and it'd probably have to do the heavy lifting of the non-existent Tornadoes of 1896 article). Do you see why nobody wants to even bother updating a lot of these? It's a bureaucratic mess and the community is in over its head by holding itself to such high standards. I think collectively we need to change our approach and say, "okay, sure, there can be a month article without a year article if we know nobody's in any rush to write Tornadoes of 1896". This is the bold sort of thinking that would really help out our space and that I'm shocked we're so resistant towards (or, at least, it feels like we are, even by inaction--and when it stops us from acting, impressions are fact).
I don't mean to come off as WP:BITEy in any of this. I commend your effort for drawing eyes to the quagmire, and hope you have the will to clean up our years-old mess. Thank you, sincerely. If you need any help, I can point you towards resources in how to write and clean up tornado articles, or help out myself if need be. Departure– (talk) 04:12, 17 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
My, my, this is my single biggest non-quote non-template edit since I pulled the ever-relevant 16 May 2025 St. Louis tornado article out of thin air (or a text editor on my laptop--you decide which is better). I think the shadow of that tornado growing has haunted me ever so slightly.
EF5, if you read this, how've you been the past year or so? How's it feel that tornado I told you about became all of this (knowing that this discussion was almost certainly triggered by hype surrounding historical tornadoes on St. Louis that happened to spike on May 16)? Fancy getting into another mess if it means cleaning things up around here? Cheers! Departure– (talk) 04:21, 17 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Departure–: long time no see! It's definitely been... a year, to say the least. You? EF5 14:04, 18 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
It's at least been a year since the collaborative spirit in the weather article community's been alive (minus maybe the Enderlin tornado's revised rating). It's strange too, this year's arguably on par with last year in terms of the same types of big storm events. I suppose Enderlin shattered a lot of the mystique around the weather community, the idea that there was a class of tornadoes hiding in the future we wouldn't see coming. That, and so many tornadoes from years past have gotten articles in just the last two or three years. I've been doing well enough in this time on everything off-wiki so please don't use my diminishing edit count as a sign otherwise. Departure– (talk) 14:44, 18 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
2 Things:
I really liked your thoughts on this subject as a veteran contributor. After some thoughts or maybe not about the article put in by EF5, I think I might make this into a “Tornadoes of May 1896” article, though I would need help with the table (I don’t know how to do a tornado table).
I also would probably go through old newspapers and write some things about the other deadly tornadoes during that outbreak, since there was much more than the St. Louis tornado and the 3 F5 tornadoes to write about. The ones I’m currently thinking about digging through some archived data are the 2 other Illinois F4 tornadoes on May 27, the May 14 Iowa F4 tornado, and the Pennsylvania—New Jersey F3 tornado (due to location). This would probably be my second “my baby” edit (I don’t know how else to explain it) where I contributed to a very large portion of the article and want to do upkeep to it (The only other one right now is the Tornado outbreak of March 10–12, 2026 article).
The second thing is much more insignificant, and it’s that it was actually a complete coincidence that I posted the discussion on May 17, though maybe some subconscious pull made me finally comment on my huge revert I made on February 1, 2026.
Anyway, thank you for your thoughts! Lavabite (talk) 15:29, 18 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
They should all be separate pages; that's all I have to say. The outbreaks are all unrelated. EF5 15:48, 18 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
My reading of this is that there's interest in making this it's own List of United States tornadoes in May 1896, not grouping everything together as a single outbreak or outbreak sequence but rather a straightforward list of events grouped together only as they happened in May 1896--just like List of United States tornadoes in April 2025 and other contemporary lists. Departure– (talk) 17:31, 18 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
That’s what I took away from this as well Lavabite (talk) 17:57, 18 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
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