The Tornado Fest That Wasn’t

Now that Sunday’s brouhaha in Tornado Alley is over and done, the big question seems to be, where were all the tornadoes? The turnout was there, the fans were waiting, but besides the rope and the wedge/multivortex/stovepipe that my buddies Bill and Tom witnessed near Crawford, Oklahoma, in company with a multitude of other chasers, there just wasn’t anything to make postcards out of. The big show never showed. Even the lone supercell that wandered north out of Texas into Oklahoma’s higher helicities never produced, despite its lack of competition. Oh, there were a couple of twisters in Kansas, and with a tally of four, Iowa had the most reports of all. Ironically,  it wasn’t even in the PDS high risk area.

This is by no means to criticize the crew at the SPC; those are some highly adept meteorological minds, the finest in the world. No, it’s just to muse at the vagaries of the weather. Rudimentary as my own forecasting skills are, I’ve nevertheless come to realize that no matter how good a forecaster one becomes, the weather is still the weather. Capricious. Subject to subtleties that no one gives weight to until after the fact. The butterfly beats its wings and a tornado fires up in Texas–or a seemingly volatile setup falls apart.

Judging from the YouTube videos and the photos posted on Stormtrack, a lot of people managed to be in the right place at the right time for the one storm in Oklahoma that did produce a couple very photogenic tornadoes. But the event was a far cry from high-risk mayhem.

Guess I can’t feel bad about that, since I was sitting at home nursing a chest cold while my mates were out there roaming the Plains. The cold now seems finally poised to start breaking up, and hopefully in another day or two I’ll feel halfway human again. It’s just as well that I get this nonsense out of the way now, so I’m up to snuff physically in a couple weeks when my buds and I head out to the Alley for an extended tour. I hope that by then, there won’t be any lack of the right ingredients in the atmospheric brew to make the trip worthwhile.

April 28, 2009 by
Filed Under: Life, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Elkhart County Historical Museum Remembers the 1965 Palm Sunday Tornadoes

My friend Debbie Watters, prorieter of the 1965 Palm Sunday Tornado Memorial Park in Dunlap, Indiana, sent me the following article from the Elkhart Truth newspaper:

It’s been almost 44 years since the Palm Sunday tornado tore through Elkhart County, killing dozens and injuring hundreds. It will be the focus of a special program at a local museum.
The Elkhart County Historical Museum is organizing a remembrance of the April 11, 1965, di saster. The memorial will be from 2 to 4 p.m. April 5 at the museum, 304. W. Vistula, Bristol.
Nicholas Hoffman, director and curator of the museum, said the tornado is an important part of local history.
“It was a really big occurrence that impacted many people,” Hoffman said.
Patrick Murphy, a meteorologist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, will talk about how tornadoes form and the factors that led to the 1965 tornado outbreak that spawned 40 tornadoes across the Midwest and left 271 people dead.
“We’re really excited to have NOAA participating in this event with us because they’re certainly the experts on these events,” Hoffman said.
A panel of survivors of the Palm Sunday tornado will take questions after Murphy’s presentation.
The panel will include John Clark, a retired Elkhart police officer, and Paul Huffman, the retired Elkhart Truth photographer who snapped the famous photo of the twin twisters.
“[Huffman] captured the horror of that day with one photograph,” said the curator.
There will be an open microphone portion for anyone interested in talking about the disaster.
The museum will also provide table space for collectors to display items they found in the wake of the tornado.
For more information call the museum at 848-4322.
Of course I plan on attending. My interest in the Palm Sunday Tornadoes extends back to my childhood, and in recent months it has become an area of increasing research. I am particularly excited to learn that Paul Huffman–whose photograph of the twin funnels striking the Midway Trailer Court, remains one of the most dramatic, all-time classic tornado photos ever taken–will be one of the panelists. That’s just my opinion, but I think that many severe weather meteorologists, tornado historians, and storm chasers will agree. Over the years I have viewed hundreds of tornado photos. I have seen some incredible images, ranging from the sublime to the scary, but nothing quite like that old black-and-white snapped over forty years ago by a young press photographer as he stood in the inbounds with his camera just a few hundred yards from mayhem, witnessing the last moments of a community.
I hope to get a chance to talk with Mr. Huffman. I also look forward to meeting Pat Murphy, lead forecaster for the Northern Indiana NWS. He and I have connected previously concerning the Palm Sunday Tornadoes, and have made plans to get together next week Sunday, April 11–the 44th anniversary of the outbreak–to trace the paths of some of the twisters. But that’s a separate story, and while this is an area of personal fascination for me, there’s also another, parallel motive which I’m hesitant to divulge just yet.
Stay tuned, though. You’ll be reading more about the 1965 Palm Sunday Tornadoes in this blog.
And on that note, I invite you to leave a comment if you experienced the Palm Sunday Tornadoes firsthand. If you are a storm survivor, or if you possess personal, unpublished photographs or old film footage of one of the actual tornadoes, I would love to hear from you.
April 4, 2009 by
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