There aren’t too many times when weather geeks completely lose sight of what is going on with the weather.
The late morning and afternoon of April 16, 2007, 18 years ago on this Wednesday, was one such time. Once Charles Steger, then president of Virginia Tech, uttered the words “at least 20” at a live televised news conference in reference to how many people had died in a mass shooting at Virginia Tech, I lost track of what was going on with the weather for a few days.
And what was going on was significant — a strong nor’easter was ripping up the East Coast, whipping unseasonably cold wind and snow behind it.
Those winds factored into the emergency response after 32 lives were taken at Virginia Tech by a gunman who took his own life. But for many of us with even the most tenuous connection to Virginia Tech, those roaring gusts provided an eerie soundtrack to a day of unspeakable horror.
The crisp cold of Jan. 28, 1986, as I waited for my school bus on the day the space shuttle Challenger exploded. Those deep blue skies and pleasant temperatures, seemingly the perfect day, on Sept. 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center and Pentagon were hit by hijacked jetliners. The roaring winds and out-of-season snow showers of April 16, 2007. Meteorological backdrops for tragedy etched in my mind and undoubtedly those of many others.
Deep April chill
April 2007 brought a drastic cold snap after a mild, low-snow winter and warm March.
Our region endured a full week of below-freezing temperatures during and after the Easter weekend, with three or four nights in the upper teens to lower 20s at many locations. With everything greened out and blooming far ahead of a typical season growing schedule, those cold nights on and around April 8 proved to be one of the most destructive freeze events ever for Virginia’s fruit crop, with a near-total loss of peaches, pears and apples.
The strong northern high pressure blocking pattern that forced so much Arctic air southward so deep into spring was beginning to relent at mid-month. But it’s often in this pattern change period when strong storm systems develop, as contrasting air masses come into contact and atmospheric energy snaps in waves, and such was the case in 2007.
A low-pressure system developed over the southwest U.S. and moved across the South, then right over our region on Sunday, April 15, before moving offshore of the Northeast U.S. coast, slowing, and intensifying on Monday, April 16.
While 36 tornadoes were spun off by the storm across the South from Texas to South Carolina, and several inches of snow blanketed parts of New England and the interior Northeast, the storm dumped over an inch of rain on many locations in Virginia as it passed through on that Sunday.
Behind the storm, cold air rushed in to Virginia on strong northwest winds overnight Sunday into Monday.
By Monday morning the 16th, snow showers were streaming over the mountains, riding winds gusting 50 to 60 mph at times as the low tightened to our northeast. Temperatures had stuck in the 30s much of the day west of the Blue Ridge.
Trees were crashing and power was knocked out for thousands in Virginia and many nearby states.
But none of that seemed to matter after I got in from walking my hiking dog Cindy through odd mid-April snow showers and turned on the TV after hearing about a second round of gunshots on Virginia Tech’s campus after two people had been killed in a dorm earlier in the day.
Helicopters grounded
“At least 20 …” Steger said about the death toll of the second shooting, and I think I doubled over with a gasp. Horribly, it was even worse.
Early videos from outside Norris Hall showed the snowflakes dancing in the breeze with the muffled gunshots in the background.
The winds kept medical helicopters grounded, unable to be deployed in the transport of shooting victims from Norris Hall.
Beyond that I lost track of the weather and didn’t even care. My next couple of days were spent behind the scenes at The Roanoke Times helping edit and organize words and photos for our coverage of this awful event.
I didn’t know anyone who lost their lives at Virginia Tech but I knew people who knew people. This hadn’t been my first time dealing with a mass shooting in an educational setting, as a middle school just outside my hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas, had been the site of a horrific school shooting in 1998 when two boys pulled a fire alarm and shot four girls and a teacher to death as they filed outside, injuring 10 others. I was there a couple hours after it happened, covering it for a newspaper 50 miles away.
I co-led the Hokie Storm Chase a month after the shooting at Virginia Tech. We put commemorative ribbons on the vans as we zigzagged through the Plains states on a rather active trip. Many places we traveled, we were asked about the events of April 16, and much comfort and support was offered to our student storm chasers.
(DISCLOSURE: I currently work full time for Virginia Tech, in communications for the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine. In 2007, I was a copy editor and weather writer for The Roanoke Times newspaper, and served as a volunteer to help lead Virginia Tech’s storm chase.)
Another ‘forgotten’ April 16 weather event
Four years later, there was another April 16 regional weather event that is sometimes called the “Forgotten Outbreak” of tornadoes. Its reason for being forgotten was more about occurring nine to 12 days before the mighty 2011 Super Outbreak of tornadoes with 368 tornadoes across the South and East.
From April 14 to 16, 178 tornadoes were reported from Oklahoma to the East Coast. This included 58 on April 16 from Alabama and Georgia through the Carolinas and Virginia with 36 fatalities, including 26 in North Carolina and two in Virginia, both in a Gloucester County mobile home. Raleigh and Fayetteville were both hit in North Carolina.
In Virginia, there was damage from tornadoes near Vesuvius in Rockbridge County, at Staunton River State Park in Halifax County, near Chase City and Victoria in Lunenburg County, near Dinwiddie in Dinwiddie County, near Drewryville and Wakefield in Southhampton County, near Urbanna and Deltaville in Middlesex County, from Windsor to Smithfield in Isle of Wight County, and at Leesburg in Loudoun County.
The most destructive Virginia tornado in the April 16, 2011, outbreak, rated EF-3 on the 0 (weakest) to 5 (strongest) Enhanced Fujita Scale, stayed on the ground for 26 miles through Surry, James City, York, Gloucester and Mathews counties in eastern Virginia. It hit near the Surry Nuclear Power Plant and crossed the Naval Weapons Station Yorktown before going over the York River into Gloucester County, where more than 100 homes were damaged and a middle school was destroyed.
While the morning passage of the storm system didn’t allow as much instability to build in western areas of Virginia as occurred farther east, and therefore there were no tornadoes south of Rockbridge County or west of Halifax County, torrential downpours triggered localized flash flooding as April 16 commemorative events were occurring at Blacksburg and the Blue Ridge Marathon was being run in Roanoke. The downpours suddenly shut off like a faucet being turned off with an infusion of dry air at mid-afternoon — almost like a High Plains dry line that helped trigger the tornado outbreak farther east.
Even as it has shown to a less destructive extent this year, mid-April often brings extreme weather events as seasons clash, whatever may be going on around us.
Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally-owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley. Sign up for his weekly newsletter:
