tpweather wrote: ↑Fri Mar 29, 2024 7:00 am
I know many folks on here I heard stories about April 3rd 1974 with the tornado outbreak and to this day its my number one weather event. I was 12 at the time and loved the weather like I do today. Of course some of the memories fade as you get older but this one stands out. Of course we were coming out of the winter season and that day is still one of the hottest days I remember. My guess is the change from winter to spring and the humidity had just climbed so fast the body was not adjusting that quickly but I can remember sweating all day long and of course no A/C. I remember just standing outside and watching funnel clouds just drop out of the sky in the mid-late Afternoon. I lived in Taylor Mill Ky at the time and though we did not have a tornado touch down it was a day that saw one of the worst outbreaks in our local area.
I hope we never see this type of day again
Tim,
We may have discussed this before, but it is my main weather event as well. The day was unusually humid, and you could just feel that something was odd about the weather. We had received golf ball sized hail that damaged one of our cars at about 4:00-4:30pm. The NWS issued more tornado watches back then and we never took them too seriously. As I stared out the window, my dad said sarcastically, "see any funnel clouds out there?" I looked up and saw a large funnel cloud on the ground headed straight for our house (it was crossing the river by Saylor Park). As it clobbered a street named Danville (levelling every home, except the one where a family recently loss their daughter), it made its way across South Road where it destroyed many homes. My dad stood on the porch watching as I screamed for him to come inside and go to the basement, which he finally did. The tornado seemed to me to make a turn from directly hitting our neighborhood to crossing over South Rd (Idk but I think its path altered as it crossed a hill by Danville and then traversed over South Rd).
The tornado then lost some strength as it neared Cheviot. Houses on Bridgetown (where a former regular poster lives) were damaged. As it got closer to Cheviot, it turned into a rope.
Here is what sticks out. The school I attended (OLV-Our Lady of Visitation) was damaged. The news reporters reported that the tornado left a war zone, and they did not see how anyone could have survived. Of course, in my head, I frantically inventoried who among my classmates lived in its path. I thought half my class and a good number of people our family knew at OLV had died. Fortunately, that was not the case. Every house had a basement. There were a handful of deaths (a person died when their vehicle was blown over), but it was not a mass casualty event. There were some injuries. The most severe involved a family whose basement beam collapsed on them, but their injuries were not life threatening.
I won a science award for doing a project on the outbreak of April 3, 1974, in high school (nobody will be able to guess where that was...). In high school, a few students started a "weather club." A member of that weather club did earn his meteorology degree (not many colleges had that degree--Ohio University, St. Louis, and tOSU, I think were the only schools that had it back then) and was a poster on here, but I have not seen him post recently. He provided updates on the Ohio River stages. It is the 50th anniversary this year and a friend that lived on Danville indicated they might get together, which apparently is something that was often done every year by that group to commemorate the event.
I think it would be exciting to see another tornado, but NOT like this. Maybe in an open field where nothing is damaged. Looking forward to spring!