Thirty-two years ago today, Xenia, Ohio

[kestrel91316]

Thirty-two years ago today the largest tornado ever recorded (IIRC) struck the town where I lived. Formed by three tornados that merged, and with a base a mile wide, this thing laid down a huge path of destruction right through the heart of this small city in Ohio (pop. 50k). It killed about 35 people, and injured 680. Thousands were left homeless.

My family's home, fortunately, was in a suburb to the west. I was at my after-school job at the front counter of a dry cleaning shop (all alone). I will never forget the ugly sky that evening.......the undersides of the clouds resembled cotton balls of a dirty pea-soup color. There was first a tornado watch on the radio, and then a tornado warning. I plotted a course of action: if I heard the freight train coming, I would go lie down in the pile of clothes waiting to be dry cleaned, where I might at least be safe from flying glass shards.

Lucky for me, but not so lucky for so many others, the tornado hit to the east. Our house was untouched. My high school was untouched, but te other HS in town was utterly destroyed, so those students had to pull the 3-11PM shift at my school for the rest of spring semester.

I understand there are parts of Xenia that have still not rebuilt.........vacant lots where homes once stood..........businesses gone and never reopened.......it was a beautiful place, full of huge trees and old Victorian homes, and will never be the same.

I'm giving Xenia a moment of silence in memory of those who died, and for those whose lives were forever changed.

[Atman]

1. I've never been there

I'm Xeniaphobic.

[4morewars]

2. wow

[laruemtt]

3. a base a mile wide!?

wow. i'm glad you made out okay, and sympathy to those who didn't. totally humbling to realize how quickly everything can just be erased....................

[kestrel91316]

5. The path of UTTER destruction was a mile wide, with another

mile on either side of that having SEVERE damage. It was on the ground for at least 10 miles, and went right through the heart of Xenia.

[underpants]

18. THREE tornadoes abreast

Side by side. I was 7 and we didn't live there anymore but I have seen the pictures.

So so many stories.

[underpants]

19. --telephone book imbedded in a telephone poll

One of the houses my family had lived in was completely got. Spotless job. The houses to either side were completely intact.

[Blue-Jay]

4. That was something else, eh? Frightening.

I was holed up in a basement near the Yellow Springs area at my aunt's house while all hell was breaking loose. I'll never forget my aunt driving us down to Xenia the following morning. It was devastating to see.

[kestrel91316]

8. We lived in Beavercreek. Remember the semis upside down

on top of that furniture store??

[Poll_Blind]

6. On a side note, the movie Gummo takes place in Xenia and...

...some aspects of the story reflect the utter broken character of the town after the tornado. Gummo is a rough movie to watch, as evidenced by the teenage main characters who support their huffing habit by killing cats at $2/lb. Fortunately, the story is ficticious. Unfortunately the poverty which the story centers around is quite real.

As a person who grew up in poverty, many of the scenes are familiar to me in some abstract sense. I would recommend the movie for those who would better like to understand what it's like to live in disadvantaged squalor in the heart of the richest nation on Earth.

For those who have never known poverty, the movie will have a dreamlike unreality of violence and ignorance hard to accept as fact. For those who have experienced it first hand, a testimony which may dredge up uncomfortable memories.

PB

[Jane Austin]

7. I remember that like it was yesterday.

I had never heard of Xenia, OH then, but I've never heard the name since that I didn't think about that devastating tornado.

Thank you for your moving, personal story.

[kestrel91316]

11. My sister was a foreign exchange student in Sweden that year,

and she was on the train returning from a weekend in Norway when she saw a newspaper (mind you, this was Europe, 1974) with headlines and photos on the front page that her town had been destroyed. She had no way to contact anybody to find out if we were ok (this was LONG before cell phones and easy calls across the ocean) so she had to sit on that train for HOURS wondering if her family was dead. Fortunately we were able to call her host family to let them know we were ok, so when they met her at the train station she got the good news.

[sinkingfeeling]

9. I remember Xenia and that day very well. One of my co-workers'

aunt and uncle were killed.

[bigwillq]

10. Wow. Incredible.

Never heard of that town or about the tornado but because of your story I think I am going to search about it now.

[kestrel91316]

12. There is a website dedicated to it, I think

[bigwillq]

14. I will Google later on

I'm sure I will find some info. on it.

[Bluebear]

13. In remembrance. nt

[AndyA]

15. I remember that horrible tragedy -

there was incredible damage, almost incomprehensible at the time. Mother Nature can be so destructive, and mankind isn't doing much to keep her happy these days.

[teenagebambam]

16. I remember it too

Growing up not far away in Columbus, adhereing to the letter of tornado safety law was the one unbreakable rule of the house.

About fifteen years after the storm my college choir toured Xenia. The poor guide was reduced to pointing out the window and saying "Such-and-such used to be there", or, "This is all new".

[Broadslidin]

17. 315 People Died, Over 5000 Injured on That Day.

http://www.april31974.com

[underpants]

20. I was born in Xenia

We lived in Yellow Springs at the time. We were just about to move to Va.

The mother of the Doctor who delivered me was sucked off her couch into the eye. She landed safely, some cuts and bruises.

The telephone book embedded in the telephone poll is one of the famous images from that day.

[boobooday]

21. I was 10 years old

I remember hearing of this -- I believe everyone who lives in tornado country knows the story of Xenia. I'm from Indiana, where we have a healthy respect for the phenomenon.

Moment of silence.

[Individualist]

22. I remember that day well

No doubt you also remember that the line of storms which produced the tornado extended from the Canadian border nearly all the way to the Gulf Coast. Numerous tornadoes were spawned that day, although none was as bad as the one which hit Xenia. I was deeply moved when I heard about the damage there, and as another DUer said, I never hear about Xenia that I don't think about that deadly tornado.

[noonwitch]

23. I remember reading about it and seeing pictures in the school mags

I think Scholastica put them out, and you would read them in class. They'd have news stories for kids.

I remember reading survivor accounts of the tornado destroying entire blocks. We had a bad one in Detroit about a decade ago, that didn't even come close in scope to the Xenia tornado. The storm in Detroit wasn't that large, either, it just hit a couple of very heavily populated areas-Hamtramck and the east side. It was the death knell for Highland Park, which was falling fast anyways after Chrysler pulled out.

I know tornados are not really funny, but the episode of WKRP that had the tornados coming was almost as funny as the Thanksgiving episode. When Les gets out the civil defense papers and subsitutes "tornados" for "communists" and reads them over the air....

[Imagine My Surprise]

24. It wasn't limited to Xenia, either...

That was a day like Armageddon for Louisville, KY, as well. Tornadoes took out sections of historic Cherokee Park, destroyed parts of the Fairgrounds Coliseum and a lot of other damage. It was a swath of tornadoes that went through a multi-state area. We also had colored lightening and earthquakes were also reported. There are websites devoted to it if you googled April 3, 1974 tornado.

[BiggJawn]

40. Monticello, Indiana got it, too.

This twister travelled for 121 miles, killing 19 people and passing about 2 miles from where I now live. Destroyed the courthouse, which was replaced by a box that looks like a 70's-era police station.

[MuseRider]

25. You never forget those things.

Ours was in 1966 http://www.crh.noaa.gov/top/events/66tornado.php

It was good for Bill Curtis since it gave him some national coverage and started his rise to fame. The rest of us always pause and remember each year what it was like.

I will pause for you today.

[iconoclastNYC]

26. Xenia - Inspiration of the film Gummo

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119237/

[underpants]

28. Neeeeeeeeeeever heard of it

but I have now

Thanks

[kitkat65]

27. We drove through Xenia maybe a couple of months after the tornado

while visiting relatives in nearby Enon. I was 8 yrs. old and I'll never forget the utter devastation that was still evident. The image I remember the most was a couch still embedded in the limbs of a completely defoliated old tree. The only thing left of the houses were the toilets. I don't know if they build ’em like they used to but if the last resort you have in a tornado is an interior bathroom, hold onto that toilet for dear life.

[underpants]

29. xeniatornado.com

http://www.xeniatornado.com/

[VolcanoJen]

30. Oh, wow. Kestrel, I'll never, ever forget that day.

I was just a little kid, living in the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio. It was a gorgeous afternoon, wasn't it? I remember so clearly playing in the front yard, all the neighborhood kids outside on one of the first nice days of spring...

And then the sky turned this eery green color. Once you've seen that color, and the clouds which turn into clusters of overfilled, greenish-black pillows, you'll never forget it, and recognize it the next time you see the strangeness of it...

It was a terrifying day. I remember Gil Whitney on WHIO-TV, the weatherman, talking about the cluster of tornadoes surrounding the Miami Valley. I remember my mother calling us inside. I remember my father, home early from work, staring at the television, looking unsettled.

I knew something truly terrible had happened. I somehow sensed that the horrible thing happened nearby, and we had just barely escaped it ourselves.

I remember my parents calling a babysitter; they drove to Xenia that night to donate blood. I'm not sure it mattered. They still felt like they had to do something.

I remember this book my mother bought me, it was a photo book about the Xenia tornado the Journal Herald published. Those photos haunted me. I'll always be terrified of tornadoes because of them. They were astonishing; I wonder if I could find that book again...

I join you in your moment of silence for the residents of Xenia, and the families of the Xenia victims.

[mtnester]

31. Those tornadoes even came to our family farm...pics from Xenia

Their High School:


An F5 tornado with winds exceeding 300 MPH. Their current fire chief was just a new recruit then, the stories he tells about that terrible day.

I remember seeing THREE tornadoes on the horizon that day as this massive super breakout continued on toward the Columbus area...Dad and I waiting outside to see whether or not we needed to free the barn animals. Little did we know what just happened in Xenia. I was 14.

[VolcanoJen]

33. Look at that monstrous cloud

Those photos haunt me to this day.

I'm not religious, but I swear, if there's a devil, that cloud was sent by it. Unbelievable.

[mtnester]

35. Jen, Xenia was called the Valley of the Devil Winds

WAY back in the day of the Native American.

That legend is till around even today.

It seems to be the baby tornado alley of Ohio.

[mtnester]

36. Here are a couple more pics from Xenia, old AND newer

and more recently:

[kestrel91316]

38. Oh that's right, they got hit again recently, right?

[countryjake]

45. Another bad one went thru in 2000...

My cousin's family lost everything in '74 there. He still lives there and was spared in 2000, but one of his children's homes got mangled and they suffered injuries.

It's a terror that's hard to get over.

Thank you for making a post about this, that day changed the lives of folks in more than a dozen states and poor Xenia has never been the same, since.

[VolcanoJen]

41. I'd forgotten they were hit again

Still, nothing will ever erase the memory of that day (I was a kid in Dayton and remember it clearly), or the first time I saw photos of the '73 Xenia Tornado. They haunt me to this day.

I think of all tornados as being the same, but clearly, that one had no equal.

[kestrel91316]

37. Yep, it was a big 'un. I look at photos of the teeny weeny skinny

tornados on the news sometimes and just LAUGH. Them's are just DUST DEVILS!!!!!!!

[Blue_In_AK]

32. The home my grandparents previously owned

when I was a young girl was wiped out in that tornado. Luckily they lived in Florida by then, but it broke my heart to think of that grand old 1920's era house being destroyed. I was back there shortly after the tornado and couldn't believe the way the cityscape had changed. You couldn't even tell where you were - all landmarks were gone.

[maxsolomon]

34. I spent that night in our basement

in Cincinnati. i was 12. it was real, and real scary.

tornados struck a friends' farm in the western suburbs near our house, drove down the bluff, across the Ohio river, and up the other side into Kentucky. nothing compared to Xenia, though.

i'll always remember the way it looked when we drove through going up to Yellow Springs a week later.

[WildEyedLiberal]

39. A moment of silence

From another who lives in Tornado Country (we had one touch down last night in my town, in fact; I spent a couple of hours huddled in my bathroom.)

[readmoreoften]

42. And Harmony Korine made the movie Gummo

that's supposed to be about the folks stuck living in Xenia.

[VolcanoJen]

43. I've never seen that film...

... but I just looked it up on IMDB and I think I need to add it to my Netflix queue... is Harmony from Xenia? Or Ohio? Any personal connection to the town or tragedy that made him want to write the film?

Thanks for the tip, readmoreoften.

[readmoreoften]

44. I was actually being a little sarcastic, sorry.

It is supposedly about Xenia, Ohio. It has some interesting footage of what might be the actual tornado (or may be another tornado.) But I'm not sure if it was shot in Xenia at all. It's an arthouse movie about the lives of poor whites living in the aftermath of the tornado, it often borders on a few American truths in an abstract way, but it is incredibly over the top at moments and some people find it very offensive.

I don't want you to think that it's a straightforward narrative on Xenia; it's not.