April 3, 1974: A Horrible, Horrible Night

(This warning is not current. It is from 1974.)

News reports from the afternoon of April 3, 1974 were disturbing. Devastating tornadoes in Louisville, Cincinnati and Brandenburg, Kentucky. The town of Xenia, Ohio was hard hit, with lots of fatalities. In Alabama, the atmosphere had bubbled over with some mid afternoon storms that produced some damage reports, but nothing really bad had happened yet. As the afternoon waned, the atmosphere took on a mournful, ominous feel however, with powerful gusts of wind.

Frightening reports started to come in around 6 p.m. Tornadoes on the ground in Lawrence County. “Big and powerful. Taking everything in their path.” Not good. The radio was my constant companion as I listened intensely for bulletins. WFMH in Cullman was also an amazing source of weather information, even when power went out at their studios. But unlike today, real information was hard to come by.

I clearly remember Wendell Harris interrupting programming on Channel 13 with a bulletin that fatalities were mounting in Northwest Alabama. But the scariest reports started around 9:30 p.m. A huge severe thunderstorm in Marion County had three well defined hook echoes in it. At 9:04 p.m., one of the most powerful storms ever to strike Alabama roared straight through the town of Guin.

Just before 10 p.m., the announcers at WFMH were broadcasting from their transmitter, observing the storm to their northwest. They read a bulletin from the Weather Service that stated that the storm over Marion County was moving at over 120 mph! I had always heard that the faster the storm was moving, the more severe it must be. Moving at double anything I had ever heard of. At 10:35 p.m., the NWS Birmingham took a dramatic step, placing the northwestern quarter of the state of Alabama under a giant tornado warning and telling people to take cover if any thunderstorm approached their area. Tornadoes were too numerous to warn for individually.

Just before 10:30 p.m., there was a report that a tornado was bearing down on the Huntsville Decatur Jetport. At 10:45 p.m., there was a report that the NWS Huntsville was abandoned and the Birmingham weather office was taking over warning responsibility.

My dad got home from work at 11:30 p.m., and I was in a tizzy. The report had just been received that Guin had been struck. It sounded like the world was coming to an end. I decided to turn off the radio about 1 a.m. and hit the sack, fully expecting we would be hit by a tornado during that terrible, terrible night. The next morning, the death toll in Alabama and across eleven states was appalling. 315 killed by 148 tornadoes in 24 hours.

– Bill Murray
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