Draft:1976 Spiro tornado

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Draft:1976 Spiro tornado

Meteorological history
Formed	March 26, 1976, 9:28 a.m. CST (UTC−06:00)
F5 tornado
on the Fujita scale
Highest winds	>261 mph (420 km/h)
Overall effects
Fatalities	2
Injuries	64
Damage	Unspecified
Areas affected	Spiro
Part of the tornado outbreaks of 1976

    This large, violent tornado touched down a few miles northwest of the town of Panama, in LeFlore County, at around 9:28 or so, in the morning. This indicates that this was an unusual, early-morning tornado.
    Nothing was out of the ordinary for its very first minutes as it moved east-northeast. However, this was about to change, as the tornado, now rapidly widening and strengthening, began to undergo a period of rapid intensification. Multiple vortices spun around the funnel, indicating that this was a strengthening multi-vortex tornado.
    The tornado, now three-thirds of a mile in width, ripped through the southern outskirts of the town of Spiro, as a large, violent tornado. Nothing stood a single chance. An entire row of residences was swept away, and a new housing addition was wrecked. The debris of the addition was strewn for many miles downstream. Trees were stripped of their bark or uprooted.
    Several cars were tossed from the road, some of which flew for hundreds of yards through the air, becoming deadly projectiles. The vehicles eventually crashed down onto nearby fields. A coal train that was transporting many coal-filled train cars with it, some of which weighed 70 tons each, was thrown from the railroad it was driving on, before being derailed. Sections of the steel rails were ripped and thrown from their original sites. Thankfully, nobody was killed on the train.  
    An oil company warehouse was knocked off of its foundation, and a nearby semi-truck was flipped and rolled several times. By far the most extreme damage seen throughout the entire path would occur at the "Murray Spur" area, just east of Spiro, where seven frame homes were swept away at F5 intensity. Additionally, three trailer homes were destroyed, before the tornado left the town of Spiro. One of the deaths caused by this tornado was in a trailer home in the southern part of Spiro.
    Having been on the ground for around 12 miles, the tornado finally came to an end, just north of the village of Pocola, about six miles east of Spiro. However, as it lifted back up into the skies, two cars were reported to have been thrown against a semi-truck, however, there were no serious injuries or deaths inside the three vehicles.
    In all, this violent tornado tracked for 12 miles and grew to a peak width of three-fourths of a mile, or 1,320 yards. The tornado killed two people, one in Spiro, and another just east of town, in the Murray Spur area, and injured 64 others. 20 cattle and horses were killed as well. Numerous homes were destroyed, causing an unknown monetary loss. The tornado was rated as an F5 on the Fujita Scale, however, Thomas P. Grazulis, in Significant Tornadoes, rated the twister as an F4, rather than the official, but disputed F5 rating.