#1974 super outbreak tv#

The westernmost squall tore through Illinois and parts of Missouri. Weather forecasters knew something was coming, but not this blitzkrieg. If there is, ain’t anything we can do about it.įrom NOAA National Disaster Survey Report, December, 1974. My father was no longer inspecting hailstones. We were all gathered by the front door then-I think it was the strangeness of the mist and Dad standing in the yard, alone. In my bedroom, I could hear the weatherman’s voice on the TV. A hoary old chiller in which you’d see Bela Lugosi’s Dracula creeping through a cold English night on his way to some dark rendezvous with Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man, or Boris Karloff in his neck bolts and flat-top as Frankenstein’s Monster zombie-walking after some helpless, winsome starlet.

#1974 super outbreak tv#

In that sickly light, the waist-high blanket of fog was something out of one of the monster movies my brother and I might watch late at night on the same TV airing Lucy in our bedroom. Now I know the mist was from quickly melting hailstones and heavy humidity. When I returned for more, Dad noted the mist and said it was strange.

I took a handful of hail to the kitchen and put it in the freezer. I don’t know if it was my brother’s simple assurance or if I’d had medicine and was feeling better from my cold, but when my father called me to come and get some hailstones to carry inside to the freezer, I set aside any anxiety and went outside to help him. became meteorological battlefields.ĭetail from NOAA map, the portion depicting known tornado tracks in Middle Tennessee during the Super Outbreak. These battling energies couldn’t dissipate upwards or flow easily to the east. All these factors colliding at once produced something uniquely cataclysmic. Had the topmost layer of cold air not been in place, there might have been normal clusters of spring storms soaking the region that day, with gusts and random rolls of thunder and perhaps some pellets of hail. When the sun rose on April 3rd, it pumped new heat into the mass of Gulf-born moisture. Above all was a heavy layer of colder air, forming a lid. That Gulf air wanted to keep rising, but warm, dry air piping in from the southwest held it down. Warm, moist air pooled over the Ohio Valley. As that low rumbled east, it drew new strength from the slowly heating Gulf of Mexico. Late on April 2nd, a powerful jet stream roaring down from the North Pole was fueling a low-pressure region east of the Rockies. Opposing air masses had martialed forces from several corners of the continent in a uniquely combustible way. He planned to cut them open later, so he could show us how hailstones are constructed from onion-like layers of ice.Īs he stood there selecting stones, the mist began to rise. Once he was sure it had stopped, Dad went outside to pick up a few stones to keep in our freezer. Ricky Ricardo was yelling at his hapless Lucy on the TV. My brother joined him, leaving me alone in the bedroom. Hail often drives straight down, he would later say, and he was struck immediately by the ‘thrown’ nature of these fat stones. It’s weird, he said, like someone’s standing behind the house and just throwing them.

In the living room, my father stood at the screen door, watching it fall. Baseball-sized stones thumped loudly on the roof. There was a strange green-yellow light outside.

I was dividing my attention between my tiny space explorer’s adventures and Lucy and Ethel stuffing chocolates in their mouths. I Love Lucy was on the small black and white TV in my bedroom. I was sick with a cold, and the storms had begun to jangle my nerves. Each storm was heavier and more frightening than the last. I remember walking a small molded plastic astronaut across the window sill, imagining him bounding across the bare, windless surface of the moon. My family lived on rural Hamilton Church Road in the southeastern Nashville suburb of Antioch. Late in the afternoon on April 3rd I sat shirtless and wearing jeans at the window of the bedroom I shared with my older brother David.