Access Minnesota May 2015: The 1965 Twin Cities Tornadoes
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- čas přidán 5. 09. 2024
- A look back at the May 6, 1965 Twin Cities tornado outbreak. Guests: Climatologist Kenny Blumenfeld, hazardous weather lead for Hennepin County Emergency Management and retired WCCO Radio executive Rob Brown who screened listener calls during the station's live severe weather coverage that night.
Our neighborhood siren had short-circuited and did not sound. We knew of the storm coming from WCCO TV and we were “glued” to WCCO radio from 6:30-9:00pm.
Well, I was living in Spring Lake Park at the time and our neighborhood took the brunt of one of the tornadoes. Although severely damaged, our house remained standing, but homes around ours were flattened to the ground. I was 14 years old and remember huddling in the southeast corner of our basement and listen to the roar of the storm tear through the area. Luckily no one in the immediate area was hurt or killed, but there was massive property damage to homes, businesses, and the school that I attended.
We were visiting my cousins, I was 5 years old and still remember this!
I remember that July1983 F4 tornado in the Northwest Metro. It was on a Sunday afternoon which may have kept the death toll at 0(IIRC)
I was nine, living in South Minneapolis. Even then I was a "weather geek" and knew what those mammatocumulus (nascent tornado) clouds to the south of us meant, but I couldn't get my mother to believe me. I felt vindicated when the civil defense siren on Hale Elementary School sounded, and when we heard WCCO's klaxon tornado warning. I never saw a tornado, but the lightning was so continuous you could've read a book by it. The sky was like night so the street lights came on, and not so much as a leaf moved before the storm started. The raindrops that first fell on the back steps were ice cold. We lost power early on and only had our transistor AM radio to rely on. My dad decided that he'd get better reception if he sat out on the back steps (!) Nope; still couldn't hear through the crashing static.
I remember that awful warning alarm on WCCO whenever a tornado warning was issued 16:06 . It was enough to wake up to the dead for sure.
Another thing that amazes me is how anyone could have made out what was being said on the radio with all the continuous lightning static.
You could understand perhaps 3/5ths of what was being said, but you could interpolate the rest. And "Go to the basement!" was all we really needed to hear!
I enjoyed the video - - I was living in Blaine at the time of the tornadoes and it was a milestone in my young life. I Do want to point out, however, that Fridley and Blaine addresses are considered Northeast rather than Northwest...
I believe this was the first time that the civil defense sirens were used for a severe weather alert. I was 13 and lived in Bloomington. Our house was about a block from Bloomington High School, which at that time, had a Federal Signal Thunderbolt T1000 siren. That was originally to warn of a Soviet nuclear attack. That siren was deep and penetrated right into your body. We got straight line winds where I lived. The sky was the sickest green color I have ever seen.
Hearing that klaxon alarm on the radiotapes doesn’t really do it justice. You would have to be in a house that is being pummeled by wind and rain and hail with a surreal green light coming in the windows highlighted by flashes of lightning and the sounds of continual thunder. Mom is at the back door screaming at dad to get in the house because he’s out in the back yard enjoying the show while we kids are terrified. The radio is all we’ve got and it sounds like a desperate broadcast from Siberia. Then the klaxon comes on, overriding the static and it sounds like evil personified. If you weren’t scared before then things suddenly changed and got real serious real quickly. But once wasn’t enough! A half-hour later the klaxon comes on again. A short tornado warning message and another round of klaxon that obliterates any hope you had of survival. Back then the warnings weren’t real selective either. The sirens would come on for a tornado that was thirty miles away but the terror was the same. There was another warning that scared the daylights out of us and this was on a local channel on TV. They had this image of an angry sun with a storm in the background while reporting information. It was truly horrible.
That claim could wake up the dead