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.
was the the Brandenburg,Ky storm??....another F-5 that day...
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.
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.