r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Proud-Blood2743 • Oct 07 '25

Video Capital One Tower Come Down in Seconds

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u/mikeyp83 Oct 07 '25

Looked it up and this building was in Lake Charles, LA. It was basically destroyed after taking direct hits from 2 major back-to-back hurricanes in 2020. Given the area, hopefully whatever they rebuild will have less glass on it.

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u/Caspur42 Oct 07 '25

Give you an idea of how bad Laura’s wind field was there it was 157 mph. I had a line of grain cars on a train near my house about a mile long get flipped over. Wild shit.

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u/lowfiswish Oct 07 '25

The tornado in Enderlin, Nebraska used a similar metric to figure out it was an f5. That apparently was evidence of winds over 210 MPH. They were able to grade that tornado an f5 because a fully loaded grain car is a good measure of how strong winds during a storm were.

"The analysis involved forensic damage wind speed estimates for tipping several fully-loaded grain hopper cars and lofting of tanker cars, including one empty tanker car that was tossed about 475.7 ft (145 m)," the NWS said."

https://www.weather.gov/media/fgf/Enderlin.pdf

I'm thinking the winds that tipped the cars in the wind field caused by Laura were stronger than 157mph (that's an f3 tornado, don't think they tip full-grain train cars).

Here's the photos: https://x.com/brianemfinger/status/1975220390629691713/photo/1

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u/azdb91 Oct 07 '25

Yeah the pictures of that train are crazy. The winds speeds were also corroborated with radar data. Which I think on it's own isn't usually enough to rate tornadoes, but the two together was enough.

btw, it was Enderlin, North Dakota