Look Back at An Individual Tornado

Bill has already covered this tragic time in Alabama in his posts this past weekend. Very well done. I mentioned last week that I would like to post some stories about my experiences during that time and focusing on some individual tornadoes during the super outbreak in early April 1974. Alabama was one of the hardest hit states.

I was on the midnight to 8 a.m. shift that week at the NWS at 11 West Oxmoor Road in Birmingham. We started getting severe storms 2 or 3 days before the major outbreak and I had worked until 10:00 a.m. on April 3. I went home to grab some shut eye and got a call back to work late in the afternoon and worked 17 hours in a row under the most extreme pressure imaginable. Mind you, there were others there–we had plenty of help.

I have heard many tornado warnings on the radio, but this one scared me to death. As I was on I-65 about 3 miles from the office, I heard this on WVOK radio, a powerful 50 watt station at 690 on the dial. I believe that station is now all sports and known as WJOX. This is the bulletin I heard:

“A huge and powerful tornado is on the ground near Moulton in Lawrence County and taking everything in its path.”

I knew then we were in for a tragic night of weather.

During those times, I was also responsible for preparing camera ready copy for the official NWS publication called Storm Data. (An enormous task) It was a monthly task. Below is the word-for-word entry of that tornado mentioned above. The only thing I cannot remember, I believe Storm Data was entered using CST instead of DST, so you might want to adjust for that.

5:50pm…A tornado touched ground in Western Lawrence County west of the intersection of Routes 101 and 24 or about 10 miles WSW of Moulton. The giant tornado moved rapidly NE taking everything in its path. Passing only 3 miles NW of Moulton, 14 persons were killed in rapid succession, mostly in the Mount Moriah community. Six members of one family were blown into the woods and died after their house was destroyed.

Passing along the north side of Jackson Mountain, it moved onto the flat terrain west of Decatur and approached the Tennessee River. A chemical plant was extensively damaged on the south bank. At 5:50 p.m., the tornado moved onto two-mile wide Wheeler Lake of the Tennessee River. It turned into a giant waterspout. It then landed on a small peninsula on the north shore.

At this point, practically all trees within a 3/4 mile wide swath were flattened leaving the pattern of a giant swirl. The tornado was so powerful that reddish top soil was dug out and plastered against the fallen trees giving them a reddish brown color. It was in this vicinity that a mobile home park was damaged 1/2 mile south of the center of the path.

One injured man was taken to a nearby church only to be killed one-half hour later when a second powerful tornado moved through. The original tornado finally lifted at 6:21 p.m. just before reaching Route 53 just ESE of Harvest or 12 miles NW of downtown Huntsville. Fatalities by counties:
14 in Lawrence
5 in Limestone
9 in Madison

All 9 Madison County fatalities occurred south of Harvest in a distance of about 2 miles shortly before the tornado lifted off.

I will probably do another post tomorrow morning about another one of the super powerful tornadoes during that tragic time. One other caution: the death and injury totals for individual tornadoes may have changed slightly after Storm Data was published

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