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1974 super outbreak12/19/2023 ![]() There were many tragic fatalities: A young child sucked into the tornado five people crushed under the debris of the local A&W. Train cars went flying, as did school buses, which eventually landed atop the destroyed school. Semi trucks were picked up and dropped atop the local bowling alley. "Every once in a while I could see a roof go up, start spiraling, then just explode into thousands of pieces." It was so huge and so close to the ground that I thought, `Oh my God!'" he told The Plain Dealer. "That cloud just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. "We stayed in there until we couldn't hear it anymore, then went out front to take a look." Hill saw the tornado rip the roof off the local high school as it moved towards downtown.įirefighter Charles Beason watched the tornado's approach with his binoculars. "The sound was like a huge semi coming up a long valley," Hill told Cleveland's The Plain Dealer in March 1999. Between my sobs, I could hear Dad praying for our protection."īetty Hill was in her home in the Arrowood subdivision of Xenia when the tornado approached, and she piled into a bathtub with a neighbor and four children. The roof ripped off, and the walls around us crumbled. I saw bedroom doors slamming against the wall before flying off their hinges. The deafening wind sounded like a team of fighter jets. He described it to the AP in 1999: "Mom and Dad covered me, shielding my body from flying bricks and shattered glass. Jeff Louderback was just 5 at the time, but the memory of riding out the storm in his house remained vivid decades later. (Meteorologists later debated whether to rate the tornado an off-the-charts F6.) It was so large that people on the ground couldn't even see a funnel cloud - just a black, swirling, half-mile-wide maelstrom. It had one of the strongest wind speeds ever recorded: 318 mph. Traveling northeast at 50 mph, the tornado then made a beeline for Xenia. She fared better than her sister, who punctured her hip, and her mother, who broke her collar and pelvic bones. Winston, who told her story to the Akron Beacon Journal on the 25th anniversary of the storm, awoke 100 yards from her home with a gash under her eye. Debby Winston, 17 at the time, saw the giant black cloud approaching and dove into a closet with her mother and younger sister just before the their house exploded. At 4:30 p.m., three separate storms converged to form a single tornado that landed on a house owned by the Winston family, 10 miles outside Xenia, Ohio, and 50 miles southwest of Columbus. The most powerful twister of the outbreak was also the deadliest. "It was a once-in-a-century event, and probably rarer than that." "There's never been anything like it before, as far as we know, or since," says Joseph Shaefer, director of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla. During the Super Outbreak, six tornadoes hit F5 on the Fujita scale and another 88 reached the 113- to 157-mph wind speeds of an F2. In 1973, an active tornado year, 1100 twisters were reported across the United States, but only one hit F5. Tornado intensity is measured by the Fujita scale, which ranges from an F0, with winds as low as 40 mph, to an F5, with winds that can reach more than 300 mph. ![]() The power of the twisters during the Super Outbreak of 1974 was truly epic. They had traveled 2014 miles the longest twister wreaked havoc for more than 100 miles. After 15 hours, the tornadoes finally died down. A state trooper in Martinsburg, Ind., reported that the town just disappeared. Twisters raged as far south as Laurel, Miss., as far north as Detroit, and all the way east to Staunton, Va. Ten minutes later and 450 miles away, tornadoes were loosed across Central Illinois - and across Indiana 10 minutes after that. The first twisters touched down at 2 pm in Bradley County in south central Tennessee and Gilmer County in northwestern Georgia. ![]() On April 3, all hell broke loose: The storm system spun 148 tornadoes across 13 states. ![]()
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