In 1970, I was 17 years old. I lived in a part of Texas well known for tornado activity. Over the course of growing up there, I'd seen a dozen or more of small to medium tornados in and around the Lubbock area. Hell, before there were "storm chasers" a bunch of us kids would get in a car and head out to find them.
Then there came May 11, 1970
It started out like so many other "tornado watches"; we paid little attention as 4 out of 5 of them came to naught.
Seven P.M. The first watch was instituted. By eight o'clock it was obvious on radar there was a tornado headed our way, but no idea how large. Back then radar was realtively primitive. They could tell it was large but without Doppler, they could only guess at the size. Here's what happened.
By 8:00 PM, there was golf-ball to baseball sized hail. The weather service issued a tornado warning and told everyone to get under cover. I was at my girlfriend's house, so I called my mom and dad to tell them I was OK.
We weren't.
As was our wont, Jenny and I were playing cribbage in the front room. Her brother came in about that time to tell us there was a tornado on the ground inside Lubbock. We had heard this many times before, practically every year we could remember growing up there. We played cribbagge for a while longer but noticed the very high winds and the picture window shaking violently. We moved to the kitchen just as the out edge of the tornado reached 34th st, just down the street from us. When we heard the roar, we knew that was something we had NEVER heard and got scared. You cannot describe the roar of an F-5 tornado. It is primal: It's like a gargantuan living being roaring out it's desire to kill anything in its path. This tornado was estimated to be one-mile wide.
We didn't know it but the tornado had already wiped out the area next to downtown, passed over downtown, and headed straight for us.
We got lucky. We had piled into the two bathrooms with the men on top of the women. We held on to plumbing fixtures as the roof was being ripped up. You couldn't hear yourself think, much less the screams of fear and encouragement to one another.
But by this time the tornado had actually "skipped" over my girl's parents neighborhood, only taking part of the roof of their house with it. It was beginning to disipate. My parents lived in a part of town away from the tornado, but they told me they had heard it as it went out into the country side.
The next day, May 12th, I went downtown to see how I could help. I was immediately commandeered to drive a food wagon (a "roach coach" for you military) serving food and coffee to the National Guard and people who were living in their storm shelters. (I did that for 10 straight days and nights without any sleep.) What struck me, besides all the wierd phenomenon like straw punched into trees, a 2x4 driven into a telephone poll, many other 2x4's and 6's sticking out of the ground and what was left of houses. The most disturbing scene was a neighborhood I knew consisting of one and two-story homes completely flattened. There was nothing higher that a few pieces of brick wall and some plumbing about 4 feet high. Absolutely nothing higher than that. It was wasteland.
Twenty-six people died that day. Before Tuscaloosa, this was the last confirmed F-5 to have struck a metropolitan downtown city center.
The upshot? I was drafted into the Army in '72 and never went back to tornado alley to this day. After what I saw, I never want to be in a place where there are tornados. I live in Alaska now. I can put up with the occassional volcano, earthquake, blizzards, -40 degree temps, flood, large man-eating wildlife. But I NEVER want to be in another tornado.
MY heart and all my good wishes go to the familes who lost loved ones. I was lucky. I didn't lose anyone I knew. But I understand the horror of the following days for the survivors.
Please, if you can, give to the Red Cross.