Ten and Twenty-Five

It was 10 years ago Wednesday that the Anderson Hills tornado hit Madison county. I can still recall vividly watching the radar and a live feed from one of our reporters in Athens as the storm approached. Suddenly, a large hook echo appeared on radar and at the same time I saw a curtain of rain wrap rapidly around the south side of the storm.

A tornado warning was already in effect but I knew then that we likely had a damaging tornado on the ground and that it would do a lot of damage. One of our reporters out in the field had asked me earlier that day what to do if, while covering a storm, a tornado developed.

I told him that he probably wouldn't see it. Most tornadoes in this part of the world are shrouded in rain. "I will yell at you to get in a ditch though if it looks real bad" I told him.

We had 2 reporters in the area as the rain wrapped around the intensifying mesocyclone. I yelled for both of them to take cover.
I'll never forget walking through the News Room later that evening and seeing him covered in mud. "What happened to you?" I asked. (he had gotten in the ditch!)


On Sunday, May 18, 1980 I was in Oklahoma City. I had only been working on air a few months and would not finish my degree for another year. Driving back to Norman the radio news on KTOK-AM announced that Mount St. Helens had exploded.

I immediately thought of the man that owned a little lodge on the mountain. His name was Harry S. Truman. (Named after the President). Many a reporter had done stories with him and he was a great character. He had steadfastly refused to leave his lodge and move to a safe distance away.

He and his lodge on the slopes of that once beautiful mountain have never been found.

Most of those who died that day were outside the restricted zone. Few expected the catastrophic type of explosion that happened. Three days later, the dense ash cloud was steered by the jet stream into Oklahoma. I mentioned on air that the edge of the ash cloud would pass over Oklahoma City about 4 pm. Sure enough at that hour a gray hazy line moved across the sky.

The next morning as I unlocked my bicycle to ride to class, there was a thin layer of ash on my bike seat. I put volcanic ash in my on-air forecast that day. Haven't done that since.

I flew over St. Helens coming back from a weather conference in Seattle a couple of years back. Got a nice picture of it at sunrise. Mount Ranier doesn't get near the attention of St. Helens, but it is probably one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. It, too, will erupt again, and many more people live near it than St. Helens. Still, new housing developments are going in almost non-stop in the shadow of Ranier.

That makes most Geologists very nervous.