ATLANTIC, Pa.
The trees have mostly grown back. The homes in this farm community near Meadville have been rebuilt, too, of brick this time instead of clapboard.
A photo from Hugh Shields' collection shows an F-4 tornado moving over a ridge towards the village of Atlantic. This tornado killed 16 people, five of them in Atlantic, on a 56 mile track before petering out near Tionesta in Forest County.Click photo for larger image.
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In fact, there is very little in the placid early spring landscape to suggest that a monster tornado once paid a visit here, although Hugh Shields tries his best to find clues as he noses his truck down a country road.
"That's where my house was," says Shields, pulling to a stop in front of a building covered in light blue siding with a sign that reads East Fallowfield Fire Department. Shields looks down at the curb, squinting. "Well, you can sort of see where my driveway was," he says.
That would be the driveway Shields was backing out of when he first saw the tornado coming toward him, 20 years ago on Tuesday, "a big gray thing, like an elephant's trunk, with lots of debris in the air."
It was only one of a swarm of Oklahoma-size twisters, 43 in all, that fell out of the sky with little warning on Western Pennsylvania and parts of Ohio, New York and Ontario on May 31, 1985. Altogether, 88 people were killed -- 65 of them in Pennsylvania -- more than 1,000 were injured and thousands were left homeless. Damage totaled $450 million, a record for that time. Seventeen tornadoes hit Pennsylvania alone, easily traversing up and down the hills and river valleys of the region, forever putting to rest the myth that such terrain can deter them.
As tornado outbreaks go, 1985's is one for the history books, listed by the National Weather Service Storm Data Center as the 12th most "significant" tornado event of all time. It was notable not just for its power but for its sheer improbability: Besides producing Pennsylvania's first and only "F-5" tornado, the strongest there is, it beat staggering statistical odds -- 1 in 75,000 -- that such a storm system could develop this far north and east. That's why Shields found himself staring, initially uncomprehending, at the behemoth moving toward him.
With no time to take shelter in the house, he wedged himself under his Chevy Malibu and held on for dear life. And then, pelted by debris, he passed out.
While telling this tale, Shields looks down at his arm. There is a reminder, after all, of his brush with the tornado: the long scar that winds down his left forearm, sliced open by flying slate while he lay unconscious.
When he came to, Shields staggered out from under the car and moved toward his destroyed house, gripping his arm. He knew that if he could get down to a sink in the basement, whose stairs were still visible, he'd be able to rinse off the blood, get his short wave radio, and call for help.
He did just that, his words still remembered by those who heard them:
"I'm hurt, and Atlantic is gone."
The path of destruction
All up and down eastern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania that evening, similar words would rasp across airwaves -- confused descriptions of death and destruction and pleas for help.
Minutes before Shields saw his tornado, a different one had slammed into Albion, near Erie, killing nine people in the town of 1,500. An hour later, another would score a direct hit on the struggling industrial town of Wheatland, in Mercer County. Farther south, at around the same time, shoppers at Big Beaver Plaza in Beaver Falls would watch, stunned, as a tornado came screaming over a nearby ridge and into the shopping mall, demolishing a state liquor store, killing a clerk and a customer -- while leaving shelves with bottles of gin and vodka intact.
From there it moved to North Sewickley where Dianne Lynn Flinner was hosting a lingerie party at a friend's home. When the twister hit, everyone fled to the cellar, but Flinner decided to retrieve her merchandise. She was sucked out of the house, her body found the next day in a nearby ravine.
For 4 1/2 hours, the tornadoes ploughed on relentlessly, part of a 100-mile-long storm front moving from the northeast to the southwest, eventually reaching as far east as Berks County.
Their power was unrelenting: of the 43 tornadoes reported in the United States and Canada, 20 were rated "F-3," severe or higher, on a damage scale devised by tornado expert Ted Fujita. The rare F-5 struck Wheatland, near Sharon -- 61 miles from Pittsburgh.
An F-5's damage is so extreme that even Fujita seemed at a loss for words to describe it when he came up with the Fujita Scale in 1971: "Incredible" is all he could say of these winds, the fastest on Earth, with speeds sometimes in excess of 300 mph. They peel bark from trees, bend steel beams like pretzels, hurl cars like missiles.
Wayne Seibel, now district judge in Evans City, saw the tornado that killed Dianne Flinner from his front porch in Zelienople. He had been inside, sitting in his recliner, watching a rerun of "The Lone Ranger" on TV, "when I thought I heard someone knocking at my door." It was hail, big tennis-ball-size pieces of it. Intrigued, he went outside to collect some to put in the freezer to show his wife. When he looked up, he saw the tornado rising over John Bury's Hill to the west.
www.may311985tornadoes.com
Video footage of the tornado that ripped through Lordstown, Ohio, and into Hermitage, Pa., on May 31, 1985, eventually becoming the F-5 that destroyed Wheatland. Windows Media Player required.
www.nssl.noaa.gov
The National Severe Storms Laboratory, in Norman, Okla., which does most government research into tornadoes.
www.tornadoproject.com
A folksy website for tornado enthusiasts, with lots of arcane and colorful information.
www.spc.noaa.gov
NOAA's FAQ's about tornadoes, good information on tornado safety.
www.k5kj.net
Everything the tornado geek ever wanted to know about nature's most violent weather.
"I didn't know what I saw, actually," he said. "I could see the top of the cloud first and then this massive black column just rose up over the ridge. The mind is trying to tell you this is a tornado, but it just doesn't register if you've never actually seen one or expect to see one here."
Seibel, then a patrolman, jumped into his police car to try to warn people, watching in awe as the funnel turned from black to orange, then blue, lit from within by flames and sparks after hitting an electrical grid.
"It was a sight I will never forget and a sight I hope I will never again see in my lifetime," Seibel said, shaking his head slightly.
Even the meteorologists were transfixed. Greg Forbes, The Weather Channel's severe weather expert, was a professor of meteorology at Penn State in May 1985. On radar, he watched, riveted, as an F-4 tornado moved through Moshannon State Forest, across Clearfield, Clinton and Centre counties, sucking up so many trees that the debris could actually be seen on the screen as a little round ball in the center of a hook-shaped radar "echo" -- the mark of a tornado. Using the reverse terminology peculiar to meteorologists, Forbes described it "as one of the best radar signatures I've ever seen."
Little warning
National Weather Service forecasters knew at least a full day beforehand that severe weather was in the works for Ohio and Pennsylvania that Memorial Day weekend -- just not how severe.
Ordinary people, too, knew something wasn't quite right, from the moment they woke up Friday morning.
"It was so hot and humid that it was almost hard to breathe," recalled Steve Watt, Crawford County's emergency manager, who was then fire chief in the town of Greenwood.
An unusually strong cold front from Canada was on a collision course with a steamy air mass from the Gulf of Mexico -- with a shot of dry air out of the West for extra instability. Despite a forecast for severe thunderstorms, though, the sun shone relentlessly for most of that Friday because of a fourth element: a stable air mass at about 2,000 feet, which served as a "lid" on the brew beneath. Then, at 3:50 p.m., the "lid" moved, and huge cumolonimbus clouds -- anvil-topped thunderheads -- seemingly appeared out of nowhere all along the Ohio-Pennsylvania line.
The first tornado watch -- predicting the likelihood of one -- was issued out of Erie's National Weather Service office at 4:45 p.m., and the first warning -- that an actual tornado had been sighted -- at 5:13. For the people of Albion, who were hit two minutes later, there was almost no time to take action.
The Emergency Broadcasting System was issuing watches and warnings to local radio and television stations, but later it was estimated that only 20,000 out of a quarter-million television sets were turned on.
And who would have believed it anyway?
"We had never seen a significant tornado here," said Watt. "So when the chatter started coming over the scanner, I thought the whole thing was kind of odd."
The twister killed six in Niles and four others in Ohio before crossing into Pennsylvania .
Seven people died when the tornado, by now an F-5, hit Wheatland. They included newly married Dave Kostka, who was umpiring a Little League game and was killed trying to protect two children with his body. Most of the town's industrial district was pulverized, along with the homes in the nearby working-class neighborhood known as "The Flats."
Helen Duby, 78, then the town's mayor, remembered walking through the ruined streets, to the sound of cries and screams from people trapped in their houses. A man sitting by a car begged her for help, and she and another resident carried him to a nearby porch. He died later in the hospital. "It's the nightmare of my life," says Duby today. "My house wasn't destroyed, but my home was destroyed, because Wheatland is my home."
Amazingly, skepticism kept some from taking shelter. In Atlantic, Andrew G. Byler, a member of that town's substantial Amish community, refused to budge from his front porch despite entreaties from his family. His body was later found in a field nearby.
In Albion, Gloria McCabe's mother, who lived next door, was luckier.
"My mom refused to go," McCabe recalled, sounding almost amused at the memory. "I said, Mom, there's a tornado, and she didn't believe me. 'Well,' she asked me, 'who predicted it?' So Harv [McCabe's son] and I physically pushed and dragged her into the basement. Then she refused to lie down on the floor because it was dirty, so we got her a chair to sit on, but that didn't matter when the house collapsed and a neighbor's waterbed fell on top of us."
McCabe turns serious when remembering the others who lost their lives. She thinks of Debbie Sherman, who waved at her neighbors from her van while they frantically tried to run her off the road to keep her from driving into the path of Albion's tornado.
"What were her thoughts, to have one of your neighbors doing that? How's that for a final look at life?"
Death, when it came, was sometimes quick.
Sandra Palmer was preparing dinner when a neighbor warned her that a tornado was coming. Palmer, four months pregnant, herded her five children into the basement as a deafening noise moved closer. They stood against a wall, behind a table with Palmer's arms around 6-year-old Luke. Then the house collapsed on them, the wall pushing Palmer and her son against the table.
"The table was crushing all of us, but it was pushing right at Luke's neck," Palmer recalled. "I kept trying to push the wall up behind me, praying as hard as I could, but it was no use."
She heard the boy take two breaths. Then she knew he was gone, her blond, curly-haired son, the one who was more afraid of thunderstorms than any of her children. Breathlessly, rapidly, Palmer talked, as she has thousands of times since 1985, about what she could have done differently.
"I don't know why we didn't lie on the basement floor. If we'd been on the floor instead of standing against the wall, it wouldn't have happened, but I didn't know to do that. He died in seconds. He took that horrible last breath --" and here, Palmer, paused, and caught herself.
"I can't bear to think about it -- but I don't know that he suffered. It happened so quickly."
Rescue and relief
Palmer was pinned by the wreckage for a half hour before she and her family were rescued, suffering only minor injuries. Others would wait longer. Some would die before being rescued.
For those arriving at the scene, chaos ruled.
"My daughter called me from College Hill and said, 'Dad, you'd better get up here, I think two trains just collided,' " recalled Russell Chiodo, Beaver County's former director of emergency services. When Chiodo arrived at Big Beaver Mall, "I said to myself, 'Holy hell,' what is this?"
Cars were piled like toys at one end of the parking lot. The Jamesway Department Store's roof was ripped off. Clothing and other merchandise, with price tags still on, would be found in the trees miles away. Looting, Chiodo could see, was an immediate problem. One police officer at the State Store asked a bystander for help in moving a fatally injured victim, only to see the man casually take two bottles of liquor and walk away.
Everywhere, people were wandering around in shock. "It was sad," recalled Crawford County Commissioner Morris Waid, an emergency worker at the time. "When you looked in peoples' eyes, they had that look of someone who is really, really drunk, not really focused, you know? "
There was some initial finger-pointing at public officials and the National Weather Service, but a review by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the service, determined that the forecasters had done the best they could, faced with widespread power outages and limited time. Multiple warning systems needed to be strengthened, however.
President Reagan declared the region a disaster area, making it eligible for federal money. Vice President George H.W. Bush toured Wheatland with Gov. Dick Thornburgh. Perimeters were immediately set up around the hardest-hit areas, making it difficult for people to return to their homes, but keeping looters out, too.
Sarah Adams, then a reporter for the Sharon Herald's Greenville bureau, remembered being allowed through the security perimeter around Atlantic and walking in search of Baird Trailer Park. All around her, power lines fizzed and popped, and pieces of pink insulation were stuck in fences.
She made her way gingerly to an emergency worker standing in a field, and asked him where the trailer park was.
"He said, 'Lady, you're standing in it.' "
There were, of course, manifold acts of kindness and generosity: Betty Marsh, Hugh Shield's neighbor in the town of Atlantic, was blown out of her home, but the local hospital treated her injuries for free. Food and financial donations poured in; motels housed the homeless free of charge. Insurers, for the most part, were able to issue checks quickly and homes were rebuilt, although some places, like Wheatland, were never the same afterward. The town suffered $50 million in damage.
Hugh Shields' wife, Virginia, lost her aunt and uncle and their grandson in the tornado. They had just moved to Atlantic from Oklahoma. The Shields' home was destroyed, although pieces of Virginia Shields' wedding dress were found in some nearby woods. They have since rebuilt outside town, and every spring, as a way of giving something back for all the help they received, the Shields travel to a church near Charleston, S.C., for two weeks of volunteer work.
There is also a memorial in town to the five who died, including Byler, who is only named "An Amish Friend."
For Sandra Palmer, the road to peace has been rocky. For years after the tornado, she dreamed every night about storms, until she learned, finally, to wake herself up, before the tornado came to kill them all. Eventually, the dreams lessened, and now, they arrive rarely. In them, she always manages to get herself and her family away in time.
Today, her children are grown and doing well, says Palmer, a registered nurse. And a few months ago, for no particular reason, she decided to embark on a scrapbooking project about the tornado, compiling all the photographs and newspaper clippings she had put away in a box.
It brought little comfort.
"I had never read anything about it until then. I cried myself sick, working on that scrapbook. Not a day goes by when I don't think of Luke," she said. "And I don't know that I'll ever really feel better until I see him again."
First Published: May 29, 2005, 4:00 a.m.
