 1974 Tornado Eyewitness
Account In 1974, I was the Meteorologist in Charge of the National Weather Service Meteorological Observatory in Marseilles, Il. On April 3, I worked the midnight to 8 a.m. radar shift. Between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m., I observed a squall line moving east through the St. Louis metropolitan area. At 8 a.m. I was relieved by David Brandon, now Hydrologist in Charge of the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. I drove home to my apartment in the next county to the east. About 9:30 a.m. my neighbor came downstairs and said that a tornado warning had been issued for our county. We watched for it, but the storm was already east of our location. This tornado was eventually classified as the first tornado of the Super Outbreak. The warning was based on a hook echo observed by David Brandon on the WSR-57 radar at Marseilles. I returned to work for the midnight shift the following morning. Because there were no echoes to report in my area of responsibility, I was listening to a Chicago station on AM radio. Every hour on the hour the network news would chime in with an updated death toll from the Super Outbreak. It wasn't until later that day that I realized the extent of the disaster. A photo of me at the WSR-57
radar console can be seen at: The WSR-57 radar network was
the primary tornado warning tool of the era. It was supplemented
by older, less-powerful WSR-1 and WSR-3 radars known as "gap
fillers." Volunteer spotters also played a vital role in
the tornado warning process. Warnings were typed by hand on a
Model 28ASR teletypewriter and distributed over the NOAA Weather
Wire. NOAA Weather Radios were confined to large metropolitan
areas. In general, there were only two or three transmitters
per state. The Super Outbreak of 1974 prompted an initiative
to greatly increase the number of NOAA Weather Radio transmitters
during the middle 1970s. |
