The Morning After…

When forecaster Jay Shelley walked out of the National Weather Service office around noon on April 4, 1974, he had been on duty for nearly twenty four terrible hours.

Things had started hopping as soon as he walked in the door on April 3rd. As soon as he arrived around 3 o’clock, he sat down and composed his first warning of the day, a tornado warning for Jefferson County. Jay said that forecasters had known it was going to be bad, but that he still was not prepared for what he saw that evening.

As he walked to his car in the parking lot at 11 West Oxmoor Road on the morning after, he was not satisfied. He knew that the National Weather Service staff had done the best that they could with what they had, but still nearly one hundred Alabamians had died in the onslaught.

Meteorologists lacked the tools they had in those days. Shelley said that cell phones would have made a huge difference. Forecasters at Birmingham had no Doppler radar, not even a television display of the Centreville WSR-57 radar. They had to rely on an open phone line to the radar operators and what was basically a fax machine link to the radar which produced fuzzy images at best. Local National Weather Service offices did not have access to real-time satellite pictures. (Meteorologists at the National Severe Storms Forecast Center did have access to images from the ATS satellite, but only during daylight hours.) There were no computers in the office. Warnings were composed on teletype machines that punched holes in paper tapes. The paper tapes were then fed into the various teletype circuits. There was no Weatheradio. Television station provided poor coverage at best. There was a recorded telephone message sponsored by First Alabama Bank. When the call volume went crazy, it cut the recording time down to ten seconds. J.B. Elliott remembers only having time to say, “Thunderstorms are becoming severe so rapidly tonight across Alabama that if any thunderstorm approaches your location, you should consider it to be severe and take cover.”

Radio stations were the real hero that night. J.B. remembers hearing the “big and powerful, taking everything in its path” warning on the Mighty 690, WVOK, as he drove to the office after being called back in to work that afternoon. Stations like WFMH in Cullman kept Alabamians informed that terrible night. Despite the lack of technology that we enjoy today, people in the damage paths all across Alabama repeated the same statement: “we heard the warnings.” When you have four tornadoes that rate F4 or F5 with extremely long paths, lots of fatalities are inevitable.

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