Palm Sunday April 11 1965 Tornadoes

[Doktor No]

If anyone is even the slightest bit interested this is the 50th anniversary of the Palm Sunday tornadoes in the upper midwest. Facebook has a decent page on the Alpine 6 Mile tornado up here in Kent County. Lots of photos have been downloaded from regular folks that took regular pictures. There are a ton of other sites that also cover the storms from their beginnings in Iowa through their end in the Cleveland, Akron and Toledo areas of Ohio.
I was 12 years old at the time and I remember standing in the middle of the interurban right of way across from our house in Kelloggsville (wyoming that is) looking northward. We could see the weatherball on top of the Michigan National Bank building downtown and the almost continous lightning to the north. The siren on the Divison Ave. Firebarn came on, that was a Wyoming volunteer station and the siren called the men into the station for a fire, but instead it went to a continous tone...TORNADO! We ran across the street to home, turned on TV and by then Alpine and 6 Mile was already gone.
There should be another interesting book and a series of talks given by the NWS Office in Grand Rapids and Mr Osteno should be doing them again. He did a splendid job on the 56 Standale tornado.
The 56 one is probably one of the earliest memories in my clouded storehouse of lifetime crap that I have in the attic of my head. Probably remember so much of it because my grandma and my dad took a ton of slides of the Standale area afterwards.
Till next time.
KL
P.S. the BEST pic of these storms in Indiana was the twin tornado in Dunlop, Indiana as it crosses the NYC mainline west of Goshen. I have never seen a pic of the Kenty County storm in action if any even exists. The one up here was a surprise...they never forecasted/warned for it till AFTER it was done. We were under a Severe Thunderstorm Warning at the time. To issue a warning the Weather Bureau had to have CONFIRMATION from a TRAINED storm spotter or a police agency, that then called the WB, then issue a teletype to all concerned, then send it out, then broadcast over TV and radio...and by then its over.

[Saturnalia]

Only two trees on our 2.2 acre property in Alpine Twp have trees over 50...both massive oaks obviously scarred by heavy tornado winds! We have a bunch in their 40s, though...tornado basically went right over.

[Doktor No]

And where might this property be located?

[Raildudes dad]

Southern Alpine Twp west of Bristol

[J T]

There's a bunch of plastic on that property from those tornadoes, too!

[Saturnalia]

There's a bunch of plastic on that property from those tornadoes, too!

Hey now, those have been attributed to a different storm...sometimes I wonder if it was best to place the house so close to the path of two major tornadoes and a wind storm!

At least we don't have tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, forest fires, or any other real destructive natural "disasters"...at least in magnitude great enough to do any real lasting damage

[J T]

There's a bunch of plastic on that property from those tornadoes, too!

Hey now, those have been attributed to a different storm...sometimes I wonder if it was best to place the house so close to the path of two major tornadoes and a wind storm!

[Saturnalia]

...it is almost as bad as building a metropolis below sea level in a hurricane alley.

[srjason]

The tornado that went through Shelby County Ohio was reported to have derailed a B&O freight train. My grandpa was in a bar and the tornado went 200 yards away, and they didn't notice until someone looked outside and everything was gone. This was a unique outbreak because of its location and insane atmospheric parameters.

I plan to attend the University of Oklahoma next year to study meteorology. Luckily they have the UP mainline right next to campus, so it won't be hard to Railfan.

[Jochs]

I couldn't find anything on the Palm Sunday 1965 tornado outbreak in Kent County, other than there were reports of tornadoes as far north as Kent County, MI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Palm_ ... o_outbreak

Here's the picture of the infamous double-tornado near Elkhart, in Dunlap, IN.


Pictures of it in Kent County won't be easy to find, if they exist, as things were different 50 years ago than they are today. Like mentioned earlier, tornado warnings were issued after one was spotted and reported to authorities, and by the time it got out to the general public, it was usually over.
Today, a blip shows up on radar and the National Weather Service issues a tornado warning for a possible tornado at x location. It goes out to local news stations and they interrupt programming to report it. Also today a lot of people have smart phones and I'm sure there's a severe weather app.(Fox 28 in South Bend was a weather app.)and those smart phones have pretty decent cameras on them now, so everyone runs out and takes pictures/videos of weather events now and sends them to various websites, so there are immediate photos available now of weather events.(During the recent blizzard, the weather channel has been asking for pictures/videos of the event...telling people to make sure they turn their phones sideways...I guess the feel the same way about vertically-oriented videos that JT does! )
I don't have a smart phone, but I do have digital cameras and a laptop, and would probably be guilty of going out in a storm and getting pics/videos instead of taking cover like you're supposed to.
I'll have to visit the area that the 1965 photo was taken sometime soon...I think that area is more developed now, which brings out another good point. A lot of people think we have more tornadoes now than we did 50 years ago, but that is not necessarily the case. Areas are more developed now than they were then. Many areas that are devastated by tornadoes now were farm fields or wooded areas 50 years ago, and damage would have been unreported. Same holds true for hurricanes. My grandparents lived in Clearwater, FL from 1977 or so until their deaths. In the time they lived there, many mangrove swamps became high-rise hotels. Many pine forests became neighborhoods or shopping plazas.