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Let’s say you are living in a Virginia town of several hundred, somewhere like Troutville or Charlotte Court House or Floyd or Fries.
In a manner of minutes, every building in your town – except a single house – is badly damaged or destroyed. A few buildings still standing, albeit wrenched off foundations or lacking large sections of roof or walls, become temporary shelters for rain-drenched survivors who crawl out of the debris-strewn hellscape their beloved town has become. Modern brick school and government buildings are crumbled. The town’s water tower is a crumpled heap with water pouring into the streets.
That was Udall, Kansas, late in the evening of May 25, 1955.
· Late April and early May are among coolest on record at several regional sites. See last section of today’s weather column.
Author Jim Minick, a former Radford University professor and current resident of Wythe County, has written a nonfiction book recalling through the accounts of survivors what is still the deadliest tornado in the twister-pocked history of Kansas, an F5 with winds well over 200 mph that claimed 82 lives in and near the town of Udall, population 410 in the 1950 census.
“Without Warning: The Torrnado of Udall, Kansas,” published by the University of Nebraska Press, is now available for purchase (see the link).
Minick, having already participated in book-signing events in Wytheville and Abingdon, will be embarking on a book tour of Kansas and Nebraska later this month, culminating with an event in Udall itself on May 25, the 68th anniversary of the deadly tornado, in the community building rebuilt following its leveling with a bridal shower in progress in 1955.
While the narrative is well-crafted to move the reader through efficiently and emotively, “Without Warning” is not always a comfortable read. There is no way the human aftermath of such a catastrophic tornado could be. Some descriptions of injuries are quite detailed. The scenes during and after the tempest are presented so vividly from Minick’s words, it is easy to imagine oneself standing amid the chaos and devastation following the Udall tornado and to feel some tiny fraction of that horror, shock and despair.
But beyond the death and destruction, the book is about resilience and recovery. Udall was not “wiped off the map” by the tornado, but instead, bounced back to rebuild as a newly modernized “Safest City” – more people lived in Udall in 1960 than in 1950. It’s still there today with a similar population. The rebuilding process, the lasting physical and emotional scars, and the subsequent anniversaries to recall the tornado’s impact are recounted by Minick.
Minick credits much of that resilience to the steadfast leadership of Mayor Earl “Toots” Rowe. The lessons of Udall go far beyond the experiences of a single town many decades ago in the heart of tornado country, extending even to a region like ours that infrequently suffers tornadoes and, though communities like Glade Spring and Pulaski have certainly experienced a sizable share of tornadic pain in recent years, has never had any on record close to the scope of destruction and death experienced by Udall.
“People who don’t necessarily live in ‘tornado alley’ like me and many others, still have much to learn from the Udall story, like resilience and the importance of community, of being a good neighbor, because like it or not, we need each other, even people we have strong disagreements with,” Minick told Cardinal News. “Other ‘lessons’ from the Udall tornado: the importance of good leadership and the great need for good stories to steer us; the need to be prepared for disasters, including ones caused by the climate crisis; and the need to remember, to know a place’s history, its many stories, to know the place we call home, and how that place and its stories and histories shape us.”
A Pennsylvania native, Minick became interested in the tornado through a sister-in-law who lived in Udall after the disaster. Her father had taught at Udall High School in 1955 but was not in town when the tornado hit.
“Without warning” has become a sometimes-mocked phrase by meteorologists and weather buffs on social media in modern times when tornado victims are described in mainstream media reports as having had no warning about an approaching tornado, when, in fact, repeated warnings were issued by the local weather service office and broadcast on local media. How many of those warnings were unheard versus merely unheeded is the core of the dilemma weather communicators and emergency managers face in the 21st century.
In Udall’s case nearly seven decades ago, “Without Warning” is an apt title and accurate way to describe the situation. As detailed by Minick with National Weather Service statements from the time, the Kansas town south of Wichita was only on the outer edge of an extended outlook area for “scattered severe thunderstorms with the possibility of tornadoes” somewhat analogous to a modern tornado watch. There was absolutely no warning for Udall residents that the tornado that had killed 20 people in Blackwell, Oklahoma, an hour earlier was headed their way.
Radar was only in its infancy for tracking severe storms, basically displaying some oddly shaped blobs, a far cry from the color-coded Doppler radar in use today that can often quickly pick up on areas of rotation in storms long before they might spawn tornadoes.
One particular phrase from Minick’s book has stuck with me, possibly owing to the ages of my own sons.
Minick begins the book by describing the bicycle paper route of 12-year-old Gary Atkinson. In an interview with the Daily Yonder, Minick said the description of a parade to start David McCullough’s “The Johnstown Flood” inspired him to give the reader a similar tour of Udall before the disaster, using the bicycle paper route as a narrative device to introduce the sights, sounds and souls of Udall on the last evening of normalcy.
Having completed his route, Gary Atkinson sat down to dinner in his family’s home.
“It would be the last time he ever rode his bike, the final paper he ever delivered, the last meal he ever ate.”
1834 tornado rips Southside counties
Tornado Talk, describing itself as “a dynamic, information packed website devoted to tornado history,” has recently published a summary of a May 5, 1834, tornado or tornado family (a series of tornadoes produced in succession from a single supercell thunderstorm) that began in Lunenburg County, then crossed Nottoway County, Dinwiddie County and the modern-day city of Petersburg (just south of Petersburg’s limits at the time) before ending in Prince George County.
“This is the oldest event that Tornado Talk has tackled,” the website stated. “Through analysis of newspaper reports, ancestry records, and information from historical societies, we have documented the details of this significant event in Virginia history to the best of our ability.”
The death toll is unknown, but may well have been 10 or more, many of them slaves of African descent (and therefore likely underreported), as it traversed forests and plantations in eastern portions of Southside Virginia toward the counties south of Richmond.
It started with children killed in log cabins in eastern Lunenburg County. In Nottoway County, 70 to 80 houses were destroyed, according to reports at the time, with possibly three people killed, including a slave on one plantation and a 6-year-old girl.
The tornado or tornado family, along with associated downdraft winds now known to be part of a supercell’s cycle, continued a path of death and destruction east-northeastward, with descriptions of buildings “blown to atoms” and “broken in pieces.”
The tornado was described in Prince George County as “resembling a volume of boiling water, the whole mass moving eastwardly, yet rapidly whirling around, and at the same time in a state of internal commotion like water foaming and boiling over.”
You can read the entire historical summary of the storm at the web page linked here.
Back to May reality
Refocusing on the here and now in Southwest and Southside Virginia, a bout of “blackberry winter” has passed as blocking high pressure patterns forcing cooler air southward into the eastern U.S. have eroded.
More typical May weather has returned, with many warm days in the 70s and 80 and nights mostly in the 50s, no cooler than the 40s.
It was an impressive cool period, comparing the April 23-May 5 period to the same dates in the past at regional locations (and some barely across state lines) with over 100 years of weather data. Those sites are listed below the average temperature ranking of the most recent April 23-May 5 period and the average temperature recorded.
· Lewisburg, W.Va., coolest, 46.3.
· Bluefield, W.Va., coolest, 47.9.
· Burkes Garden (Tazewell County), 3rd coolest, 44.8.
· Danville, 4th coolest, 55.3.
· Tri-Cities Airport, Tenn., south of Bristol, 6th coolest, 53.6
· Blacksburg, 9th coolest, 50.0.
· Roanoke, 10th coolest, 55.3
· Lynchburg, 11th coolest, 55.8.
But even with that cool break, 2023 to date, through the first week May, remains on track as the warmest year to date on record at Lynchburg (50.8-degree average through May 7, 0.2 ahead of 1938) and tied for the top at Roanoke (51.5 degrees, equal to the same time period in 2012). 2023 is also still the third warmest year to date through May 7 at Blacksburg (45.8 degrees, trailing 46.5 in 1949 and 46.2 in 1938) and fifth warmest at Danville (51.2, trailing first-place 1938 at 51.8 and three other years).
The cool spell has been a sled brake for what was a runaway warm year at many locations regionally, but it hasn’t stopped its momentum yet.
That said, there are no signals of excessive prolonged warmth ahead in May, but rather near to slightly above normal temperatures, possibly sliding back a little cooler by late next week as high pressure centers more in the West than in the East.
Our spring is being more springlike than our winter was winterlike.
Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 19 years. His weekly column is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally-owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley.
