This Day in History - Great Natchez Tornado of 1840

Tornadoes are some of the most dangerous, and deadly, storms in the world. Most are weak and relatively short, but a few break into monster storm territory. 

During any given year, more than 1,200 tornadoes touch down in the U.S. and are responsible for more than 50 deaths.  Since people receive weather warnings instantly on multiple platforms thanks to modern technology, deaths have become less frequent. In the 1800s though, the technology wasn’t available to communicate tornado warnings and this era with has some of the deadliest U.S. tornadoes. .  

Today marks the 180-year anniversary of a tornado that rampaged through Natchez, Miss., on May 7, 1840, killing 317 people and leaving 109 people injured. We usually don’t see a higher death toll than the injured count with these types of storms! This tornado was not ranked because the Fujita Scale, a rating system for tornadoes, wasn’t developed until 1971. The Fujita scale was then replaced by the currently used system, the Enhanced Fujita Scale in 2007.  

As the second deadliest tornado in U.S. history, meteorologists estimate the Natchez tornado to be an EF-4 or 5. According to reports from the time, the twister initially touched down 20 miles southwest of Natchez. Ten miles later, the path of carnage was detectible starting from Natchez Island. It then traveled north until it crossed the Mississippi River, and then diminished where the current US-84/US-428 bridge stands. Most of the damaged occurred in the river, where approximately 116 out of 120 anchored flatboats sank and took the lives of an estimated 200 individuals.  

The exact number of fatalities is inexact. Many of the bodies were unable to be identified and many were lost in the Mississippi River. An estimated count of 50 people died in Natchez, but that number also has a large amount of error attached to it. The count could also be much higher as damaged was reported on the Louisiana side of the river, where African American slaves were housed. In many fatalities counts from the time, slaves were not included in the official death tolls.  Due to the immense error, the official count today stands at 317plus, where the plus could be up to several hundred more.  

The only tornado that officially tops Natchez is the Tri-State Tornado that crossed Missouri, Illinois and Indiana’s state lines in 1925. It was a part of a system that produced 12 major tornadoes altogether. The Tri-State Tornado resulted in 695 deaths and 2,027 injuries. 

Thanks to the improvement of communication technology, the number of fatalities has gone down drastically since the Fujita Scale’s introduction in the 1970s. An average of 100 people per year died in the 1970s and since then, the number has stayed below 100. The 1990s and 2000s were relatively safe decades with the average deaths per year falling to the 50s.  

The 2010s were an anomalous decade. Just one year in, we would see the second largest amount of tornado fatalities since 1925. Whereas the Natchez and Tri State fatality count resulted from lone tornadoes, the 2011 count was from a collective outbreak. From May 21 – 26, 240 tornadoes ran through the Midwest and Plains, the deadliest of which destroyed parts of Joplin, Mo., and resulted in 158 fatalities. The remainder of the year would see more dangerous tornadoes for a grand total of 553 fatalities. We would then see the record for the least amount of tornado fatalities just seven years later in 2018. There were ten deaths that year, which may have resulted from the complete lack of EF-4 and 5 tornadoes.