Posted on 09/06/2022 6:48:02 AM PDT by basalt
This was a watershed moment in the understanding and study of "violent" tornadoes....proving the Multi-Vortex theory of Dr Ted Fujita...16 year old Bruce Boyd captures the very rare instance of an F-5 tornado forming...being less than a mile away...yes, im a weather geek...
A friend of mine, from KY, was four years old, staring at the sky from his basement in Meade County during the same super outbreak. It broke a trackor in half and drove debris through telephone poles. His parent’s cancelled checks were found hundreds of miles away in Ohio.
Tractor
i was in Michigan the day of this outbreak...we had i think 6-8 twisters in the state....none near me. But i will remember the sky that day as long as i live...the clouds were so low, almost tree top level..and the layers were going all directions at once..and going at least 50-60 MPH...you just knew something very bad was happening some place....
I lived in “West-Central Ohio” in 1974. Didn’t see the tornado, did see the aftermath. It was devastating. We may not have taken the tornado sirens entirely seriously before; we absolutely did after.
was the the Brandenburg,Ky storm??....another F-5 that day...
Scary! And that kid had big ones.
All my life, off and on, I’ve had a reoccurring nightmare about being outside, and trying to get away from a large outbreak of like 3-6 tornadoes all coming from the same area.
And very close.
Close enough to blow people off the ground.
Ugh.
One went through my yard a few years ago. Was over very fast. Knocked 5 or 6 trees down but no house damage. This was a couple years after one gutted our work building. I wanted to see one from a distance not outside my window heading right for me.
Later.
Better video: https://youtu.be/LRXhI-8rRqI
I lost the link when I came back to post but the number of tornadoes that day is in the article:
https://weather.com/safety/tornado/news/2020-04-03-april-
1974-super-outbreak-tornadoes
bttt
if you notice...they actually are just “looping” the Boyd footage....its the same shot over and over....
you can draw almost a straight line from Brandenburg Ky..to Sayler Park, Ohio to Xenia, Ohio and see that that particular super cell was just pumping out F-5 tornados...same thing happened in Alabama later that evening. The storm that day formed 3 separate squall lines and all 3 squalls were producing tornadoes at the same time...extremely rare over such a wide area.
The headline made me think of Xena, Warrior Princess. A hottie in her day!
I remember the 1974 tornado outbreak. I was staying with my grandpa and he was periodically getting up to listen to the radio and walk out on the porch and listen in the darkness. At one point he heard the freight train roar and had me get under the bed, he had no basement. We lived in the mountains of eastern Kentucky and they protect us pretty well. My Dad and Mom lived about a mile and a half away at the base of a mountain that had a communications tower on top of it. He was in the basement mopping water from all the rain and heard the same roar as my grandpa. The roar passed by and the next morning the communications towers on the mountain closest to us was destroyed. We figured one hit it and just didn’t drop down into our town.
In 1988, when I was in college we did have a tornado hit the nearest town. About 10 that night it started storming, cable and lights went out and local radio stations went off the air, there was no tornado watches or warnings. I was listening on my Walkman radio/tape player to a radio station 60 miles away and they started reporting a tornado had hit our town. We lived far enough out to catch the rain and hail. It killed a woman and made her son a vegetable the rest of his life.
My Dad went to town to check his business and the town was a war zone. Trees, power lines and phone lines down everywhere and buildings and houses destroyed. His business had a huge 100 year old tree that hit it and essentially slid down the side of the three story building and it sliced the power/phone lines off and destroyed an awning, he got lucky.
What is funny is the building was built in 1889 and there was a lodge that had a meeting on the third floor that evening that I attended and there was a letter we had received left on the desk. We went up there looking for damage and there had been so much pressure inside that dust had been forced up between the seams in the floor on each side of the seam and the yet the letter had not moved an inch.
One block over a three story furniture story took a direct hit and was obliterated. My future in laws lived seven miles from town in the mountains and for years would find parts of the towns airport hangers around their properties. Weird how they move and destroy and then not touch certain things.
I was 7 and it was terrifying.
My mom had us in the bathtub with couch cushions to cover us.
I'll never forget the continuous warnings coming from channel 7 with Gil Whitney.
My gosh - that is a good memory from being only 7 when it happened. I was 37 and I don’t remember the names of people doing the weather and warnings. Didn’t it seem like we had at least several days of warnings? I wasn’t used to anything like it - in CA, we never had warnings of impending doom - earthquakes etc. I had nothing to do but watch TV and take care of the baby so it was branded in my brain, I guess.
A high school friend from upstate NY lived and worked in the area also and was closer than we were to Xenia. My husband worked at Voss Chevrolet and the cars on the lot were all damaged from the hail but escaped the worst of the tornado.
Small world.....NOW I live in tornado and hurricane country in GA....do not like it!!!
My mom was freaking out, so of course I freaked out even more.
Now that I'm old, I try to "keep cool" for my 10 year old son.
Even if I'm secretly scared.
Wow, Voss Chevrolet.
That takes me back.
Get a Voss!
yes and sadly, many deaths.
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