Posted on 04/03/2008 6:42:23 PM PDT by fkabuckeyesrule
Xenia tornado anniversary: Town torn apart; 33 killed
By Margo Rutledge Kissell
Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
XENIA — Originally published April 3, 2004
Each spring, Cecilia Emery dreams about tornadoes.
Since April 3, 1974, when Xenia was hit by one of the country's most powerful tornadoes, her mother, Lucille Lehman, has not been able to watch news footage of the destruction left in the path of any twister.
"Everything starts flooding back," said Lehman, who was trapped in the rubble of her home with Cecilia, then 15, and her three younger children until neighbors pulled them out.
The F-5 tornado tore through the heart of town, killing 33 people and injuring more than 1,300 others. It bulldozed a path more than a half-mile wide, destroying or damaging more than 1,400 buildings, including 1,200 homes, dozens of businesses, 10 churches and several schools. By the time it lifted into the sky near Cedarville, it left behind more than $100 million of damage in Greene County.
Bruce Boyd, a 16-year-old Xenia High School student, captured the tornado on 8 mm film and still feels the lasting effects of grabbing the family's new movie camera.
Barbara Falls, whose home was destroyed in 1974, believes the disaster tested the community — not for the last time.
Twenty six years later — on Sept. 20, 2000 — another major tornado would follow an eerily familiar path of destruction through Xenia, killing one man and destroying or damaging more than 300 homes and 30 businesses. Falls and her husband had moved across town in 1996, where their home was smacked again.
Retiring Xenia schools Superintendent James A. Smith remembers seeing the "monster" 30 years ago.
"It's something that will always hold those who experienced it together," he said.
Lucille Lehman was driving home from her Dayton job on that late Wednesday afternoon when she heard a radio report about a tornado heading toward Xenia.
"I knew I had two children out delivering (news)papers," she said.
She spotted her daughter, Stephanie, and ordered her home but she couldn't find her son, Joe. Cecilia, still recovering from surgery for scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine, seven months earlier, had slipped out of her back brace to start cooking dinner.
Her mother arrived home and told her and sister, Denise, to get into the hallway because a tornado was coming. Joe came barreling through the back door yelling, "It's here! The tornado is here!"
From their front door, Lehman described seeing "a black sheet" full of debris with fingers reaching down. When the door was yanked out of her hands and the sliding patio door windows shattered, Lehman led them into the hallway.
Cecilia looked into her parents' bedroom and saw the windows break.
"The curtains were coming in at a 90-degree angle . . . The carpet was sucked out from underneath us. Then we just kept rolling and rolling," she said.
Joe and the dog he was holding were blown into the backyard, the only two not buried beneath debris.
Lehman emerged to see her Arrowhead subdivision in ruins. The 4-year-old subdivision on the city's southwest side lost more than 300 homes, many on concrete slabs with no basements.
"Oh my God, everything's gone, everywhere," Lehman recalled thinking.
Cecilia, the most seriously injured and last to be rescued, was pinned beneath the furnace and water heater.
"I really couldn't feel my legs because of all this stuff being on top of me," she said, noting that four men lifted them off her. "I was just glad to be alive."
Cecilia was taken to Greene Memorial Hospital in northeast Xenia, which had narrowly escaped the tornado's wrath, but lost its power and telephone service and its water was suspect.
About 500 people were treated in the first 24 hours; 34 of them admitted, according to hospital spokeswoman Gretchen Rives. Cecilia was later transferred to St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Dayton with abrasions, internal injuries and a back injury.
Superintendent Smith said Xenians clearly remember where they were and what they were doing at 4:40 p.m. on April 3.
Watching from the half-basement windows of varsity baseball coach Phil Anderson's Sexton Drive home just north of where the high school stood near Shawnee Park, Smith said it looked nothing like the funnel-shaped pictures of tornadoes he had seen growing up.
"By the time it had gone through Xenia it was more like a tree trunk that came straight out of the sky. . . . You could see it snapping the electrical wires," he said. "I remember what a monster it was."
Anderson had canceled practice that day so he and Smith could buy some equipment for baseball season. The fierce winds demolished the high school, empty except for a few students practicing for a play. None was killed. The roof collapsed onto the gym where the athletes would have been practicing.
"We would have been in there with probably 40 or 50 boys who were trying out for the Xenia High School varsity and junior varsity baseball teams," he said.
Of the 13 district-owned buildings, five were destroyed, three others were heavily damaged but repairable and three others suffered less severe damage.
While many thought it would take the community 10 years to recover from the widespread devastation, Smith said then-Superintendent Carl Adkins "had our kids back in school within two weeks."
Students and teachers attended schools in Beavercreek and Fairborn during odd hours. Three years later, at the start of the 1977-78 school year, everyone was back in Xenia classrooms. With federal and state aid, the district of 8,300 students received $20 million to rebuild.
"Certainly the district is much more prepared today than we were back then," said Smith, noting that each school now has a weather alert radio.
What happened to Xenia schools sent ripples through the state, which now requires school districts to hold tornado drills annually and left an imprint on the community's collective psyche.
Today, Xenia does not sound its tornado sirens during the annual statewide test in the spring because it causes panic. One year, despite advance notice, when sirens went off residents jammed the dispatch center phone system. When the weather turns nasty, a lot of parents come get their children out of school.
"There is still that paranoia," Smith said.
Twenty-six years later, an F-4 tornado struck at an unusual time — early autumn and after dark — on Sept. 20, 2000.
This time the high school, rebuilt on Kinsey Road, was spared, though its baseball field was torn up, bleachers thrown over the backstop and outfield fence ripped away. The tornado lifted up and touched down again, damaging homes further west near Stevenson Road.
Richard and Barbara Falls' residence was hit again.
Barbara keeps a framed photo of the "condemned" notice the city's building inspectors tacked on her Deanne Drive condominium after the 2000 tornado tore off part of the roof. The photo sits beside the 1974 photo of her Stadium Heights home in rubble.
The couple was not home. Her husband, a physician who died last year, was working. Barbara Falls was shopping with her daughter, Kathi, when she spotted the rotating twister "with six or seven tails." They huddled in a storage area with others.
"The pain was the worst part," she said last week, cupping her ears remembering how it felt once the tornado hit. "It really hurt. It was awful. All these years, I can still remember that."
Their car was destroyed so the dazed mother and daughter began walking toward home. It was hard to know where they were going, Falls said.
"I was coming right through the path but I didn't realize it," she said.
Falls, a nurse at Greene County's vocational school, assisted people. When they finally arrived home, they found the door hanging open. "That's when Kathi and I sat down and cried."
She later found her husband stitching up a patient by flashlight in the nurse's dressing area at Greene Memorial. Her husband, who normally rode his bicycle to his practice near the hospital, made the fortuitous decision that morning to drive the family's mobile home to work because one of their two children had taken his Mustang back to college.
"Good thing he did," she said, "because we lived in that for about six weeks."
The Falls were out of their home 13 months, but like many in Xenia, they decided to rebuild.
The Lehmans did, too.
"My idea was to rebuild and get things back as normal as we could," said Lehman, who now lives in another part of Xenia. "I figured that would be the best way to get over the trauma. You can't run away from it."
For her daughter, Cecilia of Bellbrook, an occupational therapist at Miami Valley Hospital, surviving the tornado changed her life.
"It gave me an extra ability to tune into people and know the struggle some people are going through," she said.
Seeing the tornado also had lasting effects on Bruce Boyd, 30 years later and now working in Nashville, Tenn., as a school bus driver.
After hearing the broadcast tornado warning, Boyd went outside with his mother, Connie. They spotted funnel clouds in the western sky, he said.
"I told Mom if it's going to be a tornado, I'd like to get a picture of it in motion," he recalled this week.
Standing outside his parents' Ridgebury Drive home, he used a movie camera the family purchased to shoot footage of his older sister's baby. He captured the only film footage of the tornado in its earliest minutes while it was about a quarter-mile away.
T. Theodore Fujita, Ph.D., of the University of Chicago, who developed the F scale to measure the strength of a tornado, came to Boyd's home two weeks later after the film aired on a local television station.
Using measurements from where the teen stood in the front yard and other calculations factoring in the speed of the debris in each film frame, Fujita learned a lot about the multiple-vortex tornado. "That's how he was able to determine it was an F-5," Boyd said.
Kenneth Haydu, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service's Wilmington office, said the 1974 Xenia tornado was part of a Super Outbreak, when 148 twisters swept across several states, killing 335 people in a 16-hour period on April 3-4. It still ranks as one of the largest disasters in American history.
In 1999, the national Weatherwise magazine ranked the weather system as the second worst U.S. weather event of the 20th century, behind the 1930s Dust Bowl.
Xenia was the hardest hit community during that deadly outbreak. That reality hit home after Boyd set down the movie camera and soaked in the devastation.
"The thought of documenting history was furthest from my mind," said Boyd, whose footage, requested by the federal government, is now a part of the Library of Congress archives.
Today, the record of the event reminds him of lives lost or forever changed.
"There were families we lost at our church," he said. "Little stories like that all along way left an impact with me . . . Because I filmed it, every time I showed it or talked about it, it was kind of like reliving it.
"The effect it had on me was more sadness and grief. At the end, I wasn't happy I had filmed it. I wished I hadn't."
I remember that day in Tennessee where we had many tornados and some of the worst weather in a short period I’ve ever seen.
Of course, if it happened today the poor victims would be used as pawns in the fraud of global warming.
That same outbreak also hit Huntsville, Alabama hard. Not as hard as Xenia but hard enough.
I’ll always remember that day. I was in the Army in Korea. I went into the unit that day and the 1st Sgt handed me my orders back to the states. He said: “The good news is, you got re-assigned back to Huntsville, Alabama. The bad news is, Huntsville was blown away by a tornado last night.”
If I remember correctly that was the only time that there serious consideration to call the tornado an F-6 because of the damage and size of the storm.
I remember the night very well, the wife and I lived in Cleveland at the time and the wind got very still.
Long time ago.
Yes that’s true...the weather people came very very close to making this an F6 tornado.....theres never been an F6 tornado.
May 3, 1999, Moore, OK, tornado clocked at 319 mph, highest wind speed ever recorded. While there were over 5000 homes damaged in Oklahoma that day the death and injury toll was relatively low. Forecasting and weather warnings have improved dramatically. Now, many homes have storm shelters or safe rooms. These shelters can be registered with the police and fire department so that after a storm passes they know where in the rubble to dig to get you out. People living in tornado alley take storms very, very seriously.
At the hospital, the doctors were trying to treat the injured victims in the dark. A friend of ours who underwent surgery that evening for removal of wood splinters and glass shards had to have additional surgery a year later to remove pieces of wood and glass the surgeons missed in the dark that night.
Good post.
This reminds us of the random nature of Nature.
I grew up in Ponca City, OK.
If you look at some college textbooks on meterology, that bright-red
zone of “Tornado Alley” is more or less centered on Ponca City.
During my 18 years there, I NEVER saw a tornado, nor did one ever
really hit town.
BUT, there was plenty of damage all around the area, e.g., the fellow
whose combine (wheat harvester) simply vanished after one tornado a
few miles from town. He said “the wreckage of the combine is probably
rusting in some bend of a local river”.
The closest I came to seeing a tornado was in Stillwater, OK, but I
did hide out in the basement of a university building while the tornado
passed by over a hillside a mile away.
But it was pretty impressive to see all the busted windshields of
cars that had been shattered by parking-lot gravel that high-speed
winds turned into natural buckshot.
I was there, too. Just a few miles away. I remember how awful the sky looked and the feeling of helplessness. There was no where to go. I remember clothes hanging in trees. It was just horrible.
People a couple of blocks from us were devastated and many were killed by two tornados at two separate times - late afternoon and late night. Living at the base of a mountain, both tornados skipped over our house. However, I still remember looking out the front door and seeing a Tornado roaring it's way away from us. You could see it clearly during the constant lightning strikes - it was dark out. I remember the teenage neighbor girl who took shelter with us who stated that “People are getting killed over there.”
As I said, I wasn’t in Huntsville for the 74 tornado, but I was here for the ones in 89. I left work early planning on going to the gym but decided to just go on home and changed my route. If I had continued to the gym, I would have been in the path.
That was the famous photo taken from the Xenia hospital. Our house was less than a mile from where that picture was taken. The tornado just over our house.
All that was left of a cousin’s house was the little bathromm she and her kids were in.
The sadest story I remember from that tornado was a 20-something waitress who was engaged to be married soon and she died protected children in the restaurant from fall debris when the tornado hit the A&W Restaurant.
Oh God....she went DIRECTLY to heaven!!
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