Remembering Roanoke's once-in-a-lifetime twister: 'We never expected a tornado'

By KEVIN MYATT
THE ROANOKE TIMES, 4/21/02

Pink fingers of lightning etched the sky. Century-old trees bowed to touch the ground.    "It was like the sky was charged with static electricity," recalled Karl Lankford of Roanoke.     Lankford, a Roanoke College senior at the time, had been asleep

Karl Lankford (right), then 21, and his parents, Karl andBetty Lankford, look over their ruined carport and damaged roof on April 4, 1974.

less than two hours that April morning in 1974 when he awoke to a surreal scene that he could scarcely have imagined before - and has not been able to forget since.

    "All I thought about was telling Mom and Dad, 'We've got to get downstairs,'" he said.

    As Lankford reached the hall outside his upstairs bedroom, the frightening scene outside became a horrifying scene inside. "The front picture window - I mean a big window, 6 or 7 feet long, 4 feet tall - just went flying out, curtains and so forth just went flying out."

    Cinder blocks from a neighbor's shed slammed into the window sill in his parents' bedroom. Lankford's father, also named Karl, was showered by glass from the damaged window.

    "I couldn't seem to get their door open to get them out," the younger Lankford said. "Then the pressure relieved somehow, and I got the door open."

    The Lankfords dashed downstairs.

    "Halfway down the steps, there was dead silence."

    But before that silence, the world around the Lankfords' Northeast Roanoke home had been immersed in an ear-splitting roar.

    And, yes, it sounded like a freight train.

    "I know you've heard that before," Lankford said.

    Richard Nixon and Patricia Hearst were the big headlines in The Roanoke Times on the morning of April 4, 1974. Lower on the front page, a headline noted: "170 die as twisters strike 9 states, Canada." That would be only a partial count of the previous day's dead from what would become known as the "Super Outbreak," the most widespread outbreak of tornadoes in history.

Metal twisted in trees was a common sight in the Roanoke Valley on the morning of April 4, 1974.

    Elsewhere in the valley, an 84-year-old woman stepped onto her porch to pick up that issue of the Times. The wind blew her off the porch. The woman, unidentified by all subsequent newspaper accounts, was taken to Roanoke Memorial Hospital.

    At Community Hospital, 4-year-old Dustin Westmoreland was treated for injuries suffered when the ceiling and a wall were ripped from his room at the Ferncliff Apartments in Northwest Roanoke.

    While young and old alike were affected, only six people were reported injured in the 1974 Roanoke Valley tornado, none seriously. No one died.

    The same could not be said elsewhere. On April 3 and 4 , 148 tornadoes touched down from Alabama to Ontario, killing 315 people.

   Roanoke's tornado was the 126th of the outbreak and one of eight in Virginia.

    The Roanoke Valley tornado apparently first touched down about 5:30 on the morning of April 4 at the intersection of Electric Road and

Inside Tornados: Lots more from Weather.Com

Lynchburg Turnpike in Salem, causing damage to some camping trailers at a tractor sales store. It then skipped northeast for about nine miles. Westside Elementary School and Preston Park Elementary both sustained severe roof damage; classes were canceled for the day. The Ferncliff and Grandview Village (now known as Park Towne) apartment complexes on either side of Interstate 581 near Hershberger Road were heavily damaged, with missing roofs and walls.

    According to the Red Cross, about 120 houses were damaged, mostly in Northwest and Northeast Roanoke, but also in Blue Ridge and Bonsack. Frames of homes under construction were blown down in Monterey Hills. Trees were mangled and twisted with metal. Thousands lost power.

    Damage in the valley totaled less than $600,000; with inflation, that would be more than $2 million today. In 1974, it wasn't even enough to qualify for federal disaster assistance.

According to Tom Grazulis' comprehensive historical reference, "Significant Tornadoes," the April 4, 1974, tornado was one of only two in the Roanoke Valley's history to be considered "significant." A significant tornado is defined as one that kills at least one person and/or rates F2 or higher on the Fujita-Pearson scale of tornado intensity.

    The Fujita scale rates tornadoes according to estimated wind speeds based on observed damage - F0 for those that barely lift shingles off houses to F5 for twisters that leave scenes resembling the aftermath of an atom ic bomb explosion. The Super Outbreak produced six such F5 monsters, nearly stomping towns like Xenia, Ohio, and Brandenburg, Ky., out of existence with 300-mph winds.

    An F2 storm produces 113- to 157-mph winds, resulting in roofs being blown off frame homes, mobile homes demolished, and large trees snapped or uprooted. The 1974 tornado left damage consistent with F2 winds, according to Grazulis and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Virginia Department of Emergency Management lists the storm a notch higher, at F3.

    The only known previous "significant" tornado in the valley occurred 78 years before in Salem on April 24, 1896, killing three people and demolishing at least two buildings.

    The 1974 tornado was a once-in-a-lifetime event for Roanoke Valley residents, but merely a footnote in the Super Outbreak.

    Even though he had never experienced a tornado, Lankford knew what had happened. "My first inclination was, 'There's been a tornado and there'll be devastation everywhere in the valley.'"

    Lankford thought of his grandmother across town. He headed for his car.

    No carport.

    It had been spun into a heap of scrap metal in their yard on Maplelawn Avenue.

    When the carport was torn from the house, 45 of 48 support beams in the Lankfords' roof were broken. All the downspouts were left pointing skyward. The Lankfords would spend three months in an apartment while the damage - almost $30,000 worth - was repaired.

    "I felt fortunate," Lankford said. "It was a pain to move out into an apartment, but it's not that bad when you think how others were affected, when you think how it could have been."

    Even though the carport was gone, the Lankfords' cars were fine. So was his grandmother in an unaffected part of town.

    Amazingly, none of the Lankfords' big trees were uprooted in the tempest.

    "If one of those big trees had laid down on that house, I don't think any of us would be talking today."

    "Here in the valley, we never expected a tornado," said Warren Trent, Roanoke's emergency services coordinator in 1974. "But the thing you don't expect, that's what happens."

    "We were always told the mountains would protect us," Lankford said.

    Many communities have been burned by the myth that geographical features - like rivers, gorges or mountains - offer immunity from tornadoes. Tornadoes have occurred in almost every conceivable geological environment. They've crossed the Mississippi River and flattened high-altitude forests near Yellowstone National Park.

    However, mountains do play an important role in the relative rarity of tornadoes in Western Virginia, said Jeff Stewart, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Blacksburg.

    "Mountains kind of disrupt the low-level flow a little bit, so we don't get a whole lot of the low-level shearing environment that you need to produce rotating thunderstorms," Stewart said.

    Sustained winds in different directions at different layers of the atmosphere create "shear," causing entire thunderstorms to rotate before spawning a tornado. Mountains can interfere with those winds near the surface.

    Also, cooler air often gets dammed up on the east side of the mountains. This "cold-air damming" can sap energy from powerful storms that cross the mountains from the Ohio and Tennessee valleys.

    With the Atlantic Ocean to the east, cloud cover often develops in advance of a storm system, Stewart said, so daytime solar heating does not destabilize the atmosphere as is common in the Midwest. And even when conditions are favorable, clusters of storms that tend to form in the Gulf states often rob moisture and instability from would-be storms in Virginia.

    As for the 1974 Super Outbreak: "The upper dynamics were so strong, they were able to overcome whatever limiting factors there were," Stewart said.

    It could have been worse. Much worse.

    What if the storm had struck in mid-morning instead of before dawn, endangering hundreds of pupils at Westside and Preston Park elementary schools with flying debris?

    Of what if it had hit on a sweltering afternoon, when the atmospheric heat and instability would have been greater? A larger, more vicious monster might have swept houses from foundations instead of blowing roofs off.

    But the 1974 twister had enough bite that those who experienced it are still shaken anytime a storm growls.

    "To this day, my mother cannot sleep when there's a lot of wind and a lot of lightning," Lankford said. "It's hard for a man to say, but when we're getting heavy storms and so forth, it is a little disquieting.

    "I hope I never have to go through another one."

Salem's killer tornado

Those words, in the upper left corner of the April 24, 1896, issue of the Roanoke Daily Times, belied a day that would become the only one in recorded history to connect "Roanoke Valley" and "killer tornado" in the same sentence.

Three people - a woman and two children - died when the twister wrecked a storehouse on Colorado Street in Salem. A bowling alley and corn crib were also demolished, according to the Times.

By 4:30 that Friday afternoon, the weather was decidedly not fair. "A severe rain storm with tremendous wind and considerable hail visited Salem," reported the April 25 issue of the Times, beneath an understated one-column headline - "Salem Touched by a Tornado" - typical of the era's papers.

Perhaps owing to the racial climate of the day - all three of the dead were black - readers did not learn of any death until the sixth paragraph of the 13-paragraph story. The story's opening paragraphs are preoccupied with pedestrians being "given a good drenching," a man whose bus was nearly overturned by winds, and the frenzy of Salemites rushing to the scene after hearing of destroyed buildings.

A woman named Jane Harris was killed. The "little boy" of Ellen Mullen and the 4-year-old daughter of "Sis. Bowyer" were also found dead. At least two were injured.

The account in Tom Grazulis' "Significant Tornadoes" states that the eight people buried under the rubble were members of the same family. This was not mentioned in the Times.

"It seemed a miracle that all were not killed, as the building was completely demolished and lying flat on the ground as though crashed on by some tremendous weight," reported the Times.

Grazulis rated the storm as an F2, or consistent with 113- to 157-mph winds. As Grazulis notes in the introductory pages of the book, damage ratings are more difficult to do from historical accounts than from on-site analysis by meteorologists, the practice today. Not only do such accounts tend to be scanty with information, but definitions of terms like "demolished" and "destroyed" can vary, and the structural integrity of buildings is also hard to ascertain.

Only in the next to the last paragraph did the Times report that "the wind appeared to be a tornado or cyclone." The term "cyclone" was often interchanged with "tornado" in 19th-century storm accounts.

Historian Norwood C. Middleton's book "Salem: A Virginia Chronicle" does not mention the 1896 tornado. However, the book does report that 20 houses and a covered bridge were destroyed in an 1890 twister in Salem.

So it is possible that the Roanoke Valley has been visited by at least three significant tornadoes.