This is an episode of the THG Podcast, which posts to YouTube once every two weeks in addition to regular History Guy content, about a month after it releases to podcast services. Subscribe to the RSS feed: https://feeds.captivate.fm/thehistoryguy/
On today’s episode, The History Guy is going to talk about several instances of Weird Weather. First, he’ll talk about the 1974 tornado super-outbreak. Then he’ll tell the story of record breaking weather in 1943 South Dakota. Finally, he’ll talk about the “Great White Hurricane” that hit New York City in 1888.
This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.
All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.
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Script by THG
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50 comments
It is so good that someone from "up there in the Rockies" do take heed of what us in Puerto Rico (21:18) has had to suffer with earthquakes (Zone 4 of 5), hurricanes (Cat 4+ María in 2017 the latest) and other stuff in our recent past. The infrastructure $$$ needed to make our power grid the way it is supposed to is immense, and at the U$12 Bln. the US Government is going to pay PREPA (will wind up mostly to other companies and contractors) for it are SADLY NOT ENOUGH (I expect the real amount needed to be more like U$20 Bln.) to do the job properly.
Oh, and counting there's now the pressure to "green" our vehicles and so for, IT'S EVEN WORSE.
GRACIAS to you both of you and this HISTORIA QUE DEBE SER RECORDADA (in my native Spanish) tale should get into the conscience of our viewers / listeners. We down here listen attentively to your stories as well.
What’s with you not having a (live) show? I’ve been a fallower of your Channel for over a year and this is the first time that you in your bow tie didn’t greet us. If this is something that you are going to do, then I’m out. This is not fair to your subscribers.
The 1974 outbreak was part of what spurred me into an interest to the point of a passion for weather. I went to school in Athens, Alabama near the community of Tanner where 2 (at the time of the event) F5 tornadoes struck within minutes of each other. My science teacher was the wife of the late Spencer Black, Director of EMA of limestone County. He had been Director less than 6 months at the time of the outbreak. He overcame many issues during it and turned the area into one of the most storm ready areas in the Dixie alley region. It was beyond interesting to listen to him discuss the events of that period.
I can remember hearing a story regarding the WSR57. Our local ABC affiliate in Huntsville,AL when they first acquired one the joke was (note this was during the cold War) they'd be the first to detect when the Russians attacked town.
This is the storm that ran through Louisville. I got there just after it hit. It took out huge oak trees that you could not reach around.
I live not far from Tanner, AL. The area is a tornado "magnet". Even localized storm systems passing through the Tennessee Valley area seem to spawn tornadoes in Tanner.
I moved to Plankinton SD from Iowa in April 2021. During the first couple weeks here, there was a day where you could drive 2 hours north and been in a winter weather advisory or drive 2 hours south and been in 70 degree weather. South Dakota weather is just plain weird, period.
From New York to Los Angeles "as the crow flies" is a hair over 2,400 miles, and by car, is just shy of 2,800 miles.
Ironic the distances all the tornadoes travelled, was right in between those 2 distances.
I was only 12 when the first ever recorded F5 hit Ohio in Whellersburg OH. Two of my brothers were in the town of Wheelersburg when the tornado hit as they participated in a track high meet. They didn't talk about it much after things settled down but in the few days after they told several horrifying tales of what was happening around them. One story they told was of a 2×4 that had been driven so hard not into but through a power pole. For several years you could drive by the power pole and see where the power company just cut the 2×4 off and sealed the ends.
During the outbreak one tornado hit in our yard taking the top out of one tree, knocking down a second, hopped over our garage, went between our two fuel oil tanks , hopped over a huge hickory trees in the corner of our yard the sat down in our neighbors yard taking down two trees there including a large weeping willow. After that it hopped over the ridge between us and the regional airport in Minford where it turned over several airplanes including a vintage biplane, tore up a grove and the Little League baseball foelds. From there it sat down at the high school football fieldwhere pulled the roof off of the field house sitting it down in the middle of the football field and scattering the clothes of the trackteam. For some time it bounced between the airport and the football field. My brothers had to walk home in their track team uniforms and their track shoes.
My sister was at the Ohio University campus in downtown Portsmouth OH and my brother was in the bridge that crossed from Kentucky into Portsmouth and both told about a large funnel that never touched down but if it had it would have tore apart much of Portsmouth including the OU Campus.
When it hit our property mom and I had closed all of windows. One of the windows fell on the stick that held up the window leaving a gap about 3/4" by 3". During the storm that bedroom got drinched but many believed that the gap was saved our home from being blowen over the hill that it sat on and thus saved my mothers life as well as my own.
Arizona Governor saved William Jefferson Cliton from drowning during their college days. What would it be like if Fife Symington had not been on that beach at the same time as Bill Clinton was swimming in the Atlantic.
75th
Oh boy, here we go with the radio show on a video platform again! Uhg. My phone even has a camera on it! Smh
Soaked by rain and bruised by hail I watched the F5 approach and strike Xenia from five miles away sitting on my banana seat bicycle out on my paper route after school. I was 12. The newspaper I delivered was The Xenia Daily Gazette.
I remember when I was in school, every Tuesday morning just after 10 o'clock the village would test the tornado sirens. There was a recorded tornado right next to us in Oak Park, but I'm not sure when it happened.
The ad for Metaverve is dangerous, I mean it's literally flashy I don't have epilepsy but the way they kept switching and adding bits of a flash of lights this, could be potentially bad for everyone, and with these podcasts, they inserted a trillion of ads literally I've been watching for about two hours
I love the podcasts it's the ads that annoys me
Great podcast. Only slightly upset you didn’t use one of my favorite words:
Sublimate – to go from a solid to a gas.
Another great video.😶🌫
I've always lived in the midwest, and I've been way too close to way too many tornadoes. So I was thinking about moving to Florida where they just don't have bad weather, when I realized, there might be a flaw in my plan.
Great show Lance as usual..! I remember the outbreak of '74.. I also grew-up in and around Enterprise, Alabama the home of "Enterprise Electronics" who were the primary developers of both Doppler and Color Weather radar..
I don't get the picture
Lance, I watched in horror as a 17 year old, soon to become 18, as those tornados devestated NE Georgia, just west of Gilmer County. I watched from a high ridge some 12 miles south of the storm. Accompanied by several friends, I said, "Guys, that constant lightning isn't normal, that's probably a bad tornado." We got into our cars, drove 6 miles to our county seat where we found emergency vehicles of that day — hearses were still used as ambulances. We jumped into the back of a truck to go help; however, we were turned back by fallen trees that were beyond our abilities to clear.
As a result of the devistatin in our county and the loss life, I resolved that night to never be without the skills to help others in such situations. As soon as I was 18, I began training to become a paramedic and served in our county for over 7 years. Smell is one of the most dispersed and emotive senses in our brains. As a result, I have near perfect recall of the "smell of a tornado." Even today if I pass through an area in the south where a tornado has touched down, I'm instantly thrown back to that 'dank pine smell' I'll forever associate with that night in April 1974.
I took a meteorology/climatology class in college, back in 1980, taught by Harold Taft. That man was a fount of knowledge about weather systems– tricky, "physics in an open system." he called it. He was the local weatherman for a Ft.Worth television station and gave the weather for the whole country on the big AM radio station (WBAP perhaps?) that could be heard by truckers, at night, over much of the nation, and they depended on him for knowledge about road conditions. He had to forecast tornadic weather for the highly populated Dallas/Ft. Worth area, (which is prone to them) and it weighed heavily on him to get it right. Warn people too often to take shelter, and they'd start to ignore the warnings. Fail to warn them, and he'd have deaths laid at his feet. I would not want to be a weatherman, myself, for this reason. And he had the job before the widespread availability of Doppler radar. The only time I saw him lose patience, a little, was when a fellow student and I related to him that a meteorologist who worked for NOAA had bragged to us, "We tell Harold Taft what to say." Ha!
❤️🤍💙 LOVE FROM DEKALB MISSISSIPPI USA 🇺🇸 ❤️🤍💙
In central Pennsylvania, my parents had fire drills and high winds drilled. This was in the mid sixties. My parents were very safety consequences. We discussed and planning what we were expected to do. And yes they called unannounced drills. We have had just tail ends of small tornados. But always be prepared.
Controlling the weather is just a matter of needing too much energy. We know what temp/pressure/humidity/air flow will do. It just takes an unreasonable amount of power to go about manipulating those on scale
Great presentation, brings back memories of the Columbus Day storm that hit the northwest in 1962 that caught the weather service off gaurd. Also for some odd reason Foehn has come to be pronounced Furn?
Texas energy infrastructure was known to be vulnerable and utilities were advised to insulate their natural gas pipelines, pumps and wellheads after a deep cold snap in the 1990s. Twenty-five plus years was ample time to make improvements and create emergency interconnects between the Texas electric grid.and the Eastern and Western US grids. Regulators were thwarted from mandating the frost-proofing of Texas by laissez-faire deregulation. Maximizing profits while minimizing utility bills and regulations were deemed the better paths to follow. When people began dying, the governor chose to blame windmills, which were not the cause of outages — frozen gas wells were. Texas windmills are typically taken offline for maintenance during winter months. 'Murica!
There are so many stories that can be told about the 1974 Super Outbreak. For me, one of the most stunning was when the National Weather Service office in Indiana saw the state had 16 twisters going at the same time and just put the whole state under a tornado warning. I often think about that today when we now have relatively specific polygons when warnings used to be for entire counties.
I was 11yrs old and lived in Xenia and saw the tornado. It missed my house and neighborhood by only a mile. I am forever scarred by this. When you go through this it makes you an weather expert and hypersensative
In 68 or 69 I was on my motorcycle at the Sturgis rally, it was in the upper 70s. I rode up to Deadwood in cutoffs and a t shirt. Stayed about an hour to return to Sturgis. Got caught in a freak snowstorm
I love the LBJ bit at the end that's really neat it reminds me of President Bush may not have been president had he been shot down in WWII and would have been eaten by the Japanese like the other American Pilots that were shot down in that bottle
Meteorologist here, thanks for doing this particular bit of history! It was really well done.
On a side note, cloud seeding does still happen (not by me, but I know some researchers who do it). From what I understand, it's very challenging even for them to know if they have successfully created or deterred rain.
I was 12 when the Xenia tornadoes hit looking out my house window in Columbus, OH at the time. First time ever witnessing a tornado, saw no less than 3 funnel clouds up in the air far off in the distance (now looking back, those funnels were heading for Xenia). Read about the devastation the next day in the Columbus Dispatch.
I was 15 and remember it, although where I was didn't get any bad weather.
1965 Make Minnetonka (Minn) tornado outbreak was "interesting" too.
People charging for use of the ladders to get off the trains? That is truly disgusting. What an Eff'd up City
How about Palm sunday 1965? That deserves its own episode.
Wouldn't it be great if 148 tornadoes hit Washington DC simultaneously and wiped out all those civilization destroying bureaucrappies?
Sorry, but YouTube lists PodCasts as videos and I do not do them.
When I was a kid we called the tornado siren an “air raid warning”. When did the name change to tornado warning?
we already control the weather. those 1974 events was probably a real life exercise
ah yes. sun & weather worshippers….. like the people who want to prohibit eating meat because we make the weather mad
While nowhere near the intensity of the 1974 Super Outbreak, I was in Moore, OK after the May 3, 1999 F-5 tornado and the devastation was unholy to say the least. Picture a swath varying from 500 yards to 1 mile wide that was completely stripped. The only evidence of structures was the concrete slabs that remained. Even the grass had been pulled from the ground. Now picture something on this scale hitting the same town twice in less than an hour, as in the 1974 Super Outbreak.
Thanks. I also noticed you used the term "nature's wrath", as though 'she' is an angry goddess to whom humans have done something to deserve punishment. Anthropomorphic language is sometimes hard to avoid. It's often built in to our speech and though patterns. On another note, I think there should be a kind of science that studies disaster as an impetus for societal change, even if it's only a kind of social or psychological science. We so often resist change unless or until something really bad happens. Of course, that involves both politics and economics as well. Thanks again. tavi.
Weather has played a crucial role in history as you said
The Spanish Armada was wrecked off the coast of Scotland because they sailed into a squall
Also the US seeded the clouds in Vietnam to prolong the Monsoon system.
How about how the eruptions of Krakatoa and the 1815 volcanic eruptions in Indonesia produced the year without a summer and the subsequent revolutions as well as some of the world’s greatest art – The Scream, for example
I lived 10 miles outside of Xenia, Ohio (still do) and my mom worked there at a Singer sewing shop. Luckily she did not work that day but what the tornado did to the little city of Xenia on '74 was just unbelievable. WHIO TV JUST got their weather radar with Gil Whitney as the weatherman…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Whitney
Xenia is the tornado magnet for Greene County Ohio. Was not till about 3 years ago last Memorial Day that Beavercreek/Trotwood, Northridge, Dayton got hit by 5 or 6 tornadoes – maybe 7 hit that evening.
Stood on our front porch in Logansport, IN and watched the oddest black clouds roll in. Next day we found out that Monticello, IN had been desimated.
Talking about anthropomorphizing weather, it always cracks me up when the news talks about a storm "targeting" an area. Like, "This storm has decided to hit this one area, and it can't be dissuaded!"
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