On April 2, 1974, a cold air mass over the Rocky Mountains was heading directly toward a warmer blanket of humid air flowing northward from the Gulf of Mexico. Forecasters at the National Severe Storms Forecast Center couldn’t determine exactly where, but they were certain that severe storms would form within twenty-four hours in the middle or lower Mississippi Valley, and they advised local weather station offices throughout the area to be on the alert.
Some municipalities have contemplated eliminating their tornado siren systems, and many others have eliminated them. If your city no longer has a warning system, then you would be wise to invest in a weather radio that automatically turns itself on when a warning has been issued.
Around 2 p.m. Central Daylight Time, two tornadoes touched down at nearly the same moment in Gilmer County, Georgia, and Bradley County, Tennessee. For the next sixteen hours, one tornado after another churned to life, slicing through thirteen states from Mississippi to Michigan. The outbreak was unprecedented in US weather history: in less than twenty-four hours, 148 tornadoes tore across America, six of which grew into giant F5 twisters with winds as high as 318 miles per hour. The previous year, only one F5 storm was recorded in the United States. And some years there are none at all.
One of the cities hardest hit by the outbreak was Xenia, Ohio, where an F5 tornado destroyed half the town in just nine minutes. A local television station spotted the approaching twister on its radar scope and broadcast the image of its hook echo, and police cruisers took to the streets with loudspeakers, warning residents to take cover immediately.
The massive tornado entered the city around 4:30 in the afternoon, ripping apart a housing development before leveling the downtown business district, leaving a trail of wreckage 2,000 to 3,000 feet wide. The tornado destroyed schools and businesses with equal fury and went on to demolish 85 percent of Central State University. It took out nine churches and 1,333 homes and businesses, and left thirty-three people dead in the wake of its rampage. After the storm, two hundred trucks a day rumbled through Xenia’s rubble-strewn streets to clear away the debris, but the clean-up process still took more than three months. On a wall at City Hall, a small plaque pays tribute to those who died on that terrible day.
In all, the super outbreak took 330 lives and injured 5,550 people in a wide swath from Georgia to Illinois, causing damages totaling $600 million in 1974 dollars. By the time it was over, storm warnings had been issued for nearly half a million square miles, and tornadoes had directly affected more than 600 square miles of countryside.
Few would argue that many more lives would have been lost if not for the warnings issued by the National Weather Service and other agencies. Even without the benefit of modern NEXRAD radar and high-resolution satellite images, the Weather Service saved lives by issuing 150 tornado warnings and 28 severe weather watches during the developing disaster, helping to reduce the death toll.