Terror in the Night

This story is taken from publisher C.F. Boone’s The Alabama Tornadoes, one of a series of photo story books that was published after the April 3 1974 tornado outbreak. It gives an excellent account of a terrible day in Alabama weather history. It was written by Jack Hartsfield of the Huntsville Times.

TERROR IN THE NIGHT
By Jack Hartsfield
The Huntsville Times

Unseasonable sweltering heat for early April. The humidity sent sweat trickling down the small of your back; your clothes stuck to your body. Everything had begun innocently enough as thousands of North and North Central Alabamians returned to their homes that sultry Wednesday afternoon.

Folks joked about having mid July weather on April 3, but the heat still made you restless, irritable as you gazed into the skies with the thunderheads were building up to the southwest. It’d been freezing weather only days earlier, but the muggy heat had everyone grumbling and looking for a breath of fresh air in any in air conditioned building.

Reports had persisted since midday about tornado watches but Alabamians had become accustomed to that over the years. And for a couple of years now, folks had been talking about tornado Alley shifting to the southeast, or so it seemed, from its Midwest corridor.

In metropolitan Huntsville, hub of Madison County and the birthplace of the US. space program at Redstone Arsenal, the day had been business as usual.

Well almost as usual except for clean up work underway at the Sherwood Park housing area where an undetected tornado had smashed through on, of all days, April Fools’ Day. Residents were picking up debris and looking over a number of shattered homes where $850,000 in damage had occurred. Nne trailer occupant in the county area had been killed by the twister and six others injured.

Huntsvillians talked about that tornado in November that virtually leveled Huntsville aviation at the Huntsville Madison County Jetport. And now another in the Sherwood Park area. Enough was enough.

Now here were the reports of tornado watches again, a scant 36 hours after the Sherwood Park incident. The heat, the humidity was bad enough, but to worry about these new weather reports was adding insult to injury.

A Huntsville business executive knocked off from work an hour early, drove home, and kept reminding himself that he’s have to get the back yard barbecue going in less than an hour if he was going to make his regular Wednesday night bowling league.

In the rural areas of North Alabama, farmers slowed their work pace because of the heat; some quit early and headed home for an early supper. For some, there would be the routine of Wednesday night prayer services.

In towns like Jasper, Decatur, Huntsville and Athens, in small sleepy towns across the central and top of Alabama, the reports of new tornado watches went relatively unnoticed – for a while.

Time out for the television news.

My God! They’re opening the broadcast with the weather and they’re talking about tornado warnings – not watches. One has been spotted just west of Decatur! “On the ground destroying everything in its path…!”

Thus began six hours and 49 minutes of unbelievable nightmares throughout county after county in North and North Central Alabama. At least six mammoth twisters were to wreak death and destruction, devour everything in their path in what will go down in history as an unparalleled natural disaster in modern Alabama.

Nothing quite like it had ever happened before, at least not of the magnitude that left at least 77 persons dead, 838 injured, 223 hospitalized, 895 homes destroyed, 898 others severely damaged; and 203 mobile homes blown to splinters and perhaps and quarter billion dollars in damage across 18 Alabama counties.

No one could comprehend what was about to take place.

The first twister, spawned in the vicinity of Russellville in Franklin County, was initially tracked at 5:22 p.m., racing with reckless abandon across Lawrence County, ravaging portions of Moulton and adjacent areas.

In Lawrence County, Phillip and Althea Owens and their four children were among the dead when the twister struck with unbelievable force, howling, swirling winds of destruction.

Still on the ground, it roared into Morgan County near Hillsboro and Trinity, leveling everything in its path, and then careening just south of Tanner in Limestone County before it reached the western edge of Madison county.

All along its path, it struck farms, homes, businesses with the strength of an atomic blast before continuing its devastation in Madison County south of Harvest and heading toward Fisk while swatting Hazel Green. The killer twister kept gaining strength.

At Decatur, the tornado had slammed into the 200 foot tower of Amoco Chemical Tennessee River plant, crumpling it with tornadic winds. At the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant, the largest nuclear power plant in the world, reactors automatically shut down as the tornado tippled power transmission lines miles away.

Gathering strength and leveling structures like a steamroller, the tornado raced on. “I was in a shallow highway ditch and watched what I though was sure death ass near Tanner,” Bob Dunnavant, a new reporter, said. “It was like something out of the Old Testament, a pillar of clouds, black, majestic and ominous moving across the farmlands of southern Limestone County.

“we were listening to a radio reporter just south of us at the trailer park saying he was heading for the ditch, and about 15 second later our house exploded, survivor Grady Swanner of Tanner said.

Marvin Moore had just returned to his Harvest home from a church meeting and had taken his shoes off in the living room to relax. His wife and four children were in the bedrooms.

“I knew the alerts were out, but I hadn’t really been keeping up with them,” he said. “I saw it coming out the picture window. An ugly thing. I don’t remember anything else.”

The twister smashed the Moore home into kindling, throwing the Moore family from the home scattered their bodies for 100 yards. Moore’s wife was dead, his baby girl was dead; three of his other children were injured and Moore received critical wounds. He woke up in a muddy field with rescuers standing over him.

At Harvest, the killer twister snapped telephone poles and century old trees like matchsticks, exploded homes and trailers as if made of cardboard; blew barns, bodies, farm machinery, cattle, livestock across the landscape in a half mile path.

Total devastation!

Almost unbelievable, the mammoth twister had remained on the ground for two hours and 23 minutes over a 75 mile course. Still packing the fury of a nuclear blast, the twister chewed, and snarled its way through most of Franklin County, Tennessee.

Even while rescuers tried to sift through the rubble of shattered homes and farms near Harvest, yet another unheard of occurrence was ahead. Another twister! The second in less than 40 minutes and only a half mile away from the path of the first. Rescuers kept working to save injured, pull the dead from the wreckage of their homes. The second twister was bearing down on the same Harvest Hazel Green area although electrical power was out and only transistor radios could provide warnings.

Mrs. Howard Truittt thought the night was over when the first twister plowed a path to her home, then leaped over it at the last minute.

Before she could recover, the second twister demolished her home. Neighbors found her crawling across the street, deep in pain and bleeding.

Moving on a parallel course, the second tornado had been spotted at 7:23 p.m. west of Tenner in Limestone County and continued its savage destruction through northwest Madison county to the Tennessee border, tracked for 57 minutes for a distance of 36 miles.

The county was in virtual panic: calls for blood at Huntsville Hospital, calls for assistance; power out, injured, dead. Ambulances needed immediately. Radio and television stations became more emphatic where electrical power could still get the message through for everyone to take shelter.

A third tornado was cutting a destructive swath through North Central Alabama, striking a hospital at Jasper, roaring through Cullman County, across Morgan and finally into Madison County before it leaped back into the sky near Paint Rock in Jackson County after 70 miles on the ground and one hour and 18 minutes of stark terror.

At Jasper, the scene appeared one of a town struck by a week long artillery barrage with damage estimates of over $175 million.

There couldn’t possibly be more!

The most destructive of all the tornadoes was yet to come.

Spawned near Columbus, Mississippi, the twister growled its way into Marion County, Alabama, destroying almost everything in the town of Guin and kept moving on the ground to the northeast through Winston County and Morgan County before advancing into Madison County south of the Huntsville Madison County Airport.

“There’s nothing left of Guin but its name,” reports came in.

Sirens blared at Huntsville Manufacturing Company in Huntsville and Civil Defense loudspeakers carried warnings throughout sections of southwest Huntsville for residents to take cover. The twister was taking dead aim at southwest Huntsville. Homeowners, weary of the night long vigil, found it inconceivable that yet another twister would roar through the county.

There was enough for one night!

WAAY-TV, Channel 31, zeroed in on its radar scope and the twister was cutting a savage path into the county. There were those who were becoming convinced that the television station was over-dramatizing and that the situation could not possibly be as bad as reported.

Again, Huntsville Manufacturing sirens and loudspeakers blasted out warnings. An eerie stillness prevailed outside. How, some wondered, could another be on the way when the clouds appeared scattered, the winds calm?

It was 10:50 p.m. in Huntsville when soldiers at the Army Missile and Munitions Center and School looked out through the blackness to the saddle of Wheeden and Madkin Mountains to the west.

A mammoth twister was working its way through the saddle, bearing down on the troop area when more than 1,000 U.S. and foreign troops were housed for missile training. There was little more time than to move to the bottom floors of the multi-story barracks and drop to the floor.

Cutting a swath a quarter of a mile wide, the twister virtually shattered the barracks area, flattened the new gymnasium, tossed cars around like toys, demolished other buildings an snapped telephone poles at the base. Air defense training equipment was picked up by the twister and smashed into a outdoor storage area. The headquarters building at MMCS was smashed, windows blown out and equipment thrown around inside the building. More than 98 buildings were destroyed or severely damaged. Miraculously no one was killed. Mammoth trees with bases 20 feet across were ripped from the ground like twigs.

Catapulting off the federal installation, the twister struck again near the Patton Road and Drake Avenue entrance, ripping Monticello Apartments and carrying portions of its roof into an adjacent housing area. The twister’s destructive path was obvious: everywhere it moved rough monumental destruction. McDonnell Elementary School was demolished and adjacent housing units ripped to shreds by the winds.

Chewing its way across the landscape, the twister whirled on its destructive path and smashed Glenn’ll Trailer Court in southwest Huntsville. Roads were blocked where mammoth trees were uprooted. Dazed residents scrambled from the wreckage of their homes in the darkness, still unable to comprehend the full impact of the damage around them. Relatives, trying to come to the park to check on damage to the homes of loved ones, were to be turned back a mile away.

The tornado moved on a northeast path on Leeman Ferry Road, where it cut down everything in its path, including businesses, storage houses, everything. At Sterling Cadillac, the twister gutted the building, taking out the west wall first, portions of the roof, and then the east wall. Almost 200 yards south, the fringe of the same tornado tipped other buildings, flipped cards on Memorial Parkway and bent utility poles to the ground.

The killer slashed into the International House of Pancakes at Drake and Memorial Parkway where about 20 customers huddles on the floor. The windows exploded and the roof was bombarded with flying debris from as far away as a mile at the Glenn’ll Trailer Park.

The twister kept gathering steam, then ripped Parkway City Shopping center apart and leveled businesses in adjacent areas before moving into Thornton Acres, where it ripped roofs, toppled trees and smashed homes before lifting just east of Whitesburg Drive in Huntsville. Then it jumped to Monte Sano Mountain, destroying and severely damaging more homes, before moving down the eastern slope of Monte Sano where it slashed along the landscape for another 18 miles, demolishing woodlands all the way to Madison County Fishing Lake.

It was the same tornado that destroyed Guin at 9:02 p.m. that struck Huntsville at about 10:50 p.m., a span of one hour and 46 minutes over a distance of over 100 miles.

At least six tornadoes had moved across Madison County during the terrible Wednesday night. Ambulances screamed throughout North Central and North Alabama all through the night, seeking injured, carrying injured to hospitals and digging out the dead.

But it would be during the first rays of dawn that the devastation would become apparent.

Alabamians knew the fear of the worst natural disaster in modern Alabama history.

Category: Met 101/Weather History