April 3rd, 1974 Tornado Outbreak.....

[indiucky]

Forty four years ago today I was 10 years old and had climbed my neighbors tree to get a hula hoop out that I had "accidentally" throwed into it...As I lived on the river I could normally see Louisville's skyline..Especially from that height...What I saw was a green sky and a very, very, very dark cloud over downtown Louisville near the Louisville Gardens...I thought "That's way to big to be a tornado"....I was wrong...


My mother came out of the house and screamed at me to get down...I said, "Mom Louisville is covered with a black cloud!!!!"

"Get your little a$$ down from that tree NOW!!!!!"

"But...The Hula Hoop????"

"NOW!!!!"

And I did...She grabbed my four year old little brother, the transistor radio, a blanket and we got into out tiny closet and waited....

Then it passed...Clarksville did not get hit....We listened to WHAS's helicopter pilot tell us where the tornado was headed...


Forty Four years ago this day....And today the sky kind of had that look...In memory of all those lost that day....Brandenburg, Louisville, Borden, Madison, Hanover and on and on...The worse tornado outbreak in US history....

Lest we forget.....

Cherokee Park then....

Now...

 

[w_ADAM_d88]

That's kind of alarming yet at the same time a good reminder to always be prepared.

I know they were saying today that if the sun comes out this afternoon and the temps rise that all Hell will break loose this evening.

 

[littletommy]

I remember that day like it was yesterday. My dad was on I-65 by Freedom Hall when the roof blew off, I remember him saying how they jumped out of the truck and over the guardrail to get in a culvert. I watched the sky turn green from the front porch of the house. The most vivid memory I have is of the WHAS traffic copter guy following the tornado and giving a play by play of where it was and what it was destroying, I still have that old AM radio.

April 3rd is a bad day, I lost my older sister on this day 25 years ago.

 

[CountryBoy19]

And it's looking like we could have a repeat... One of the weather centers I follow that usually has pretty accurate predictions said, "I don't want to say 'outbreak' just yet but it's possible to have multiple tornadoes and supercells come out of this event" referencing the one unfolding now and expecting to occur across Indiana from 1-8 pm.

 

[indiucky]

That's why I posted this today countryboy...The air has that "feel"...Hard to explain...

 

[indiucky]

The most vivid memory I have is of the WHAS traffic copter guy following the tornado and giving a play by play of where it was and what it was destroying, I still have that old AM radio.

[video=youtube;5orxm6fDKWQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5orxm6fDKWQ[/video]


Eyes in the skies
Candace Medina, who was 14 at the time, had come home from school that day, and made dinner plans with her father, WHAS traffic helicopter pilot Dick Gilbert, before he left for the airport.
She recalls that as she settled in to watch TV, the news cut in. "They came on and said we have a severe thunderstorm warning and it's looking bad," she said. "I went outside and looked and ... (the sky) was just absolute pitch black. It kind of looked like it was boiling."
Medina gathered a radio, flashlight and the family dog and was heading into the basement when she heard the sound of her father's helicopter coming over the trees.
"I ran out in the front yard," she said. Gilbert's Bell helicopter hovered about 100 feet over the ground. "I could clearly see him, and he was saying 'Get in the basement!' "
Like countless others that afternoon, Medina huddled in the basement, listening to her father on the radio as he tracked the massive tornado tearing through the city on a diagonal from the state fairgrounds to Oldham County.
"The power transformers have been blowing regularly in the path of this thing — big, large explosions of blue-white light that help clock it pretty well," Gilbert told listeners as the tornado moved through the Highlands, according to a transcript.
Both Gilbert and WAVE's Captain Dick Tong gave Louisvillians aerial descriptions of the storm's destruction and helped direct traffic around blocked-off roads. Gilbert's work that day earned him a commendation from then-President Richard Nixon.
"The tornado really demonstrated our reliance on radio," said Keith Runyon, a former Courier-Journal editor who was a cub reporter in 1974. "People who didn't have electricity still had transistor radios."

 

[indiucky]

[video=youtube;LseviQdgFhI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LseviQdgFhI[/video]

 

[printcraft]

Hey, they have the Starbucks rebuilt in Kokomo so it’s about time for another round to come through.

[video=youtube;13Vu9v56WTE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13Vu9v56WTE[/video]

 

[Wolfhound]

I remember this. An F4 tornado went through Kennard in 1974 not far from where we lived. It destroyed 70% of the town including the school.

 

[snorko]

Hah, the sirens are going off as I type. Tornado watch in effect till 8:00 p.m. cst. Doesn't look that bad to the NW though. I am roughly 180'-200' above the ground in an office building. Love when we get the strong winds. You can feel the building sway slightly and watch the windows flex under pressure.

 

[bwframe]

I was 14. First year of jr high. Got off the bus and watched the quarter sized hail hit the ground for a minute. Then watched a huge spinning cloud fill up with debris (that we first thought was birds.) The debris was from my school, two miles way. 1/2 hour earlier the school was filled with 600 students.

 

[nipprdog]

Tornado warning here.

 

[KellyinAvon]

I was 9 then. I remember traveling east on Indiana Highway 60 between Pekin and Borden not long afterwards. About a mile east of where the 2012 tornadoes hit in Pekin there was a hillside where the trees were mangled like nothing I've ever seen since. I remember thinking it looked like giants came and twisted the trees like the ties on a loaf of bread.

 

[lovemywoods]

The day after the Monroe Central High School was wiped from the face of the earth, I rode my motorcycle on a gravel road about a mile south of the school. I remember seeing the swath of twisted trees where the tornado was moving along the ground and then realized for several hundred yards, there was no loose stone on the road!

 

[deo62]

How’s everyone doing in today’s storm?

 

[littletommy]

I was 9 then. I remember traveling east on Indiana Highway 60 between Pekin and Borden not long afterwards. About a mile east of where the 2012 tornadoes hit in Pekin there was a hillside where the trees were mangled like nothing I've ever seen since. I remember thinking it looked like giants came and twisted the trees like the ties on a loaf of bread.

I know the exact spot you’re talking about. It was definitely something I’ll never forget. For years, maybe decades after, you could still tell something crazy happened there.

 

[Hoosier45]

How’s everyone doing in today’s storm?

Spent 30 minutes in the basement, running up to look out the window every 5 minutes while my wife yelled at me to get back down here. Rotation reported right over our house, but I never saw it.

 

[sugarcreekbrass]

Not bad near Crawfordsville. Sirens did go off, but nothing major. Just a lot of rain. They had rotation spotted over Crawfordsville but I have seen a lot worse. Thankfully it moved through quickly. The wind is stronger now than an hour ago.

 

[deo62]

Good to hear you're all ok, sounded bad for awhile. So far only had to work one small power outage here.

 

[Mgderf]

I was 6 or 7 years old in 1965.
On Palm Sunday that year I sat in church with my family in Kokomo.

I remember the lights going out in the church, and the very uneasy feeling of the adults.
Thankfully I was more or less oblivious to the danger.
I remember emerging from the church into an alien landscape.

The highway in front of the church was gone. The concrete was just rubble.
Almost every vehicle in the church parking lot had the windows broken out, including ours.
The next day we drove around town looking at all the damage.