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1974 Tornado Eyewitness Account
By Allan Fisher, Forecaster
National Weather Service, Chicago

I was working as a meteorological intern at the National Weather Service office in Columbus, Ohio during the 1974 super outbreak. This was my first experience with severe weather since arriving at the office the previous October.

The Xenia, Ohio tornado touched down in Dayton's counties and then moved northeast into our coverage area. We saw a hook echo from the storm as it moved over our counties to the northwest of Columbus. The storm produced very large hail at Ohio State University Airport which was northwest of Columbus.

As I recall, it produced a small tornado north of the city of Columbus after producing wind damage in our counties to the west of the city.

I remember being told the story of a call made to one of the county sheriff's office looking for damage reports. Turns out the sheriff's office was in the basement of a very old stone county courthouse built around 1900. The storm produced a funnel cloud which barely stayed aloft. It hit the top of the courthouse and totally striped out the clock. All they had on top of the courthouse was steel box left with nothing in it.

Later that day we saw another hook echo well to the south of Columbus. The radar was an old converted air force radar that the office had. It had a PPI scope, a RHI scope, and a DBZ scope which allowed manual settings of increasing DBZ filtering. It was through this crude means that allowed us some ability to see the internal storm structure. The radar was very manually intensive, and took a lot of experience for correct storm interpretation.

Other equipment was old teletypes. The warning had to be manually punched into a paper punch tape which was then manually fed thru the reader. Nationally, the paper tape then had to be fed into the old RAWARC teletype.

I remember that day—there were so many warnings and radar reports on the circuit, that you literally had to be very quick to start your tape to put it into RAWARC. The only time to enter your tape was when there was a break in circuit traffic, and that day there was virtually no break in the warnings and radar report on the circuit.

I also remember being told that some of the storm tops were so high they literally went off the top of the RHI scope.

At Columbus we had a line of severe thunderstorms with hail sometime in the morning and then the tornado cells in the afternoon. At the time, we had no direct way to warn Columbus. Within a short time thereafter, the City of Columbus installed a direct hotline from out office to the fire dispatch. At the desk was the button to hit the air raid sirens as they were called then.

For more information contact Bob Chartuk at (516) 244-0166.