“I watched as everything around us was destroyed.” Ricky Burch.
“I heard the strangest and scariest natural sounds of my life as the storm approached.” Ed Landry.
“… made a remarkable impact on my life.” James Spann.
“The lightning was like nothing we had ever seen and still haven’t to this day.” Eleita Dunlap Kinard.
“… will never forget one minute of the ordeal.” Mike Oakley.
“The roof of the building was rapidly peeling away.” John Brasher.
Following are personal accounts from John Brasher, Ed Landry, James Spann, Eleita Dunlap Kinard, Mike Oakley, Ricky Burch. To add yours, please email to:
brenttornado@bellsouth.net
———-
By: John Brasher
May 27, 1973, in Centreville, Alabama, dawned with that certain “feel” that is indicative of possible weather trouble ahead. By mid-morning a steady southwest wind was bringing with it an abundant supply of Gulf moisture. The air was becoming heavy and sultry.
At the time, I was a newly hired photographer/reporter for the Centreville Press. I had been in Centreville only two weeks, and thought this Sunday might turn out to be a good opportunity to head down to the Centreville radar site to document their operations during severe weather. Turned out I was right. Before the day was done, I, along with other residents of Brent & Centreville, would experience the ravaging force of a massive tornado which would be rated an upper level F4. Borderline F5.
I drove to the weather office shortly after noon. The staff at Centreville Radar that day were Dale Black and Bob Coe. Dale was the radar operator. Bob’s primary duty was manning the teletype machine, passing information along to the National Weather Service Forecast Office, located at the time, at 11 West Oxmoor Road in Birmingham.
The weather situation turned very serious, very quickly that Sunday afternoon. Dale was tracking tornadic storms that were popping up before him on the radar screen almost constantly. A steady stream of warnings went out from West Oxmoor that day based on teletypes from Centreville Radar.
Then, late in the day, a monster storm in the making, indicated by a very distinct hook echo, appeared to our southwest, at a location near Demopolis. I was standing beside the radar console, watching Dale work, when he first saw what would become Alabama’s longest track tornado. He worked the radar controls, scanning up and down the height of the storm and plotted its anticipated path on the radar screen. We checked the near wall size map of Alabama that hung on the wall facing the console in the large radar room. I’ll never forget Dale saying that if the tornado held together, it would pass right over us. It did hold together.
A tornado warning went out almost immediately for counties upstream. Centreville Radar continued to track the storm as it worked over Greensboro and targeted Bibb County. The radar site, and Brent, which was about 8 miles to our northeast, were in the cross-hairs.
After the warning had gone out, the weather guys and I walked outside to the northwest corner of the building. We wanted to see what the conditions were like. Dale or Bob, can’t remember which, made the comment that the wind felt like it was coming from a blast furnace.
That steady, strong wind, which I think must have been at about 25 or 30 miles per hour as it blew from the southwest, was indeed a very warm wind. And it carried a “sweet” smell, like that of freshly cut hay. It was heavy and oppressive. I’ve never felt conditions like that before or since. It is something you don’t forget. After being outside for a couple minutes, we went back into the station.
A few minutes later, as Dale was at his console, I was standing in a hallway door that led into the teletype room. Bob was at the teletype sending a message regarding another storm in another part of central Alabama that was also being tracked.
Suddenly, Bob and I felt very sharp pain in our ears. It was an abrupt and dramatic drop in atmospheric pressure. Bob looked up at me with an “uh-oh” expression, for lack of a better word. I’m sure Dale felt the same thing. We all met in the hallway and headed for the lobby of the building. That room had glass almost from floor to ceiling and faced north. We watched in amazement as everything but the kitchen sink swirled around and past those windows. Then we realized that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to be standing at that particular spot. We retreated to the hall.
Seconds later, I felt what reminded me of fine grain sand hitting my face and arms. The roof of the building was rapidly peeling away. Dale and I dove into an office, and onto the floor, beside a sturdy desk. I don’t know where Bob ended up as the storm struck with full force. I remember hearing no train sound as I have heard described. Only the sounds of chaos…objects hitting what was left of the building, crashing sounds, ripping sheet metal, and such. After what must have been only a couple minutes at the most, but seemed much longer, the tornado effects ended as suddenly as they had begun. The three of us were unhurt, but not unaffected. Strangely enough, a telephone in the teletype room continued to operate for a short time. It was on this line that Dale Black contacted West Oxmoor, telling them “We’ve been hit!”
Centreville Radar had been blinded and dealt a crippling blow, but the weather guys were still able to get word out of our situation and what was coming for Brent. And Bob Coe was able to reach his wife at home in Brent to make sure his family took shelter. Minutes later, the house was totally destroyed. Bob’s family was safe after having taken refuge in an interior closet, under a staircase.
We walked outside to inspect the damage. The radar dish had been blown from its tower and lay on the ground no more than 20 feet from the office Dale and I had jumped into. The dome that had covered the dish had taken off for parts unknown. The roof was two thirds gone, and the rest of the building was battered and looked as if it had been sand blasted.
The Brent Tornado went on to kill 5 people in Brent. One person was killed in Greensboro, and one in Wilsonville. Nearly 200 were injured. The tornado that had spun to life near Demopolis finally dissipated 135 miles to the northeast, on the western slopes of Mt. Cheaha. Sections of Hale, Perry, Bibb, Shelby, Talladega, Clay, and Cleburne counties all suffered destruction from the Brent Tornado. Several days later, Centreville Press publisher Jim Oakley and I followed the path of the storm in a plane from Brent to Columbiana. The tornado never lifted from the ground as it followed highway 25 the entire way.
It was a day not easily forgotten.
At the weather station that day, dedication to duty outweighed concern for personal safety. I don’t know if he got one or not, but Dale Black deserved a commendation from the weather service for his work and keeping on task under surreal circumstances.
A little humor in a bad situation…the tornado had worked us over pretty good, and with nothing left to do at the radar site, Dale, Bob, and I headed to our vehicles to try to get home.
Bob and I had fairly new cars and several windows in each of them were blown out. Dale had driven his old “fishing truck” to work. That thing was pretty well beat up even before the storm hammered us. But all of his windows were still intact. Dale gave Bob and me a lot of grief about how his old truck had come through unscathed while our newer rides looked a lot worse for the wear. We watched Dale pull out of the parking lot onto the road. At that point, the rear window fell out of his truck.
Justice prevailed.
———-
By: Ed Landry, former radar operator at Centreville.
The weather office in Calera forwarded your website
and letter to me about the great tornado of May 27,
1973. I haven’t forgotten it, but not a whole lot of
people care much to hear about it, anymore…
I was an off-duty radar operator at the weather office
out on the hill in Bibb county. I wasn’t on duty
during the passage of the storm; my shift was to begin
at midnight. I remember making our way out to the
observation site late that night after the storm with
Dale Black to check on the damage… Pretty
impressive! That film strip you refer to on your
website that had the picture of the storm clearly on
it: I pulled that very 16mm film cartridge from the
automatic camera to protect it from the water coming
in through the absent roof. I took the film home to
guard it, knowing it had some important images on it.
I lived directly across the street from the Brent
Baptist Church in a two-story Victorian home owned and
rented by Ruby Goodson. I heard the strangest and
scariest natural sounds of my life as the storm
approached. The thunder was far more peculiar than any
I had ever heard and that familiar “train” sound
indicated that the biggest train on Earth was pulling
into town! Trees make it very rough trying to watch
tornadoes in the South, so I ran outside and even into
the road to see what was coming. Never saw the
complete funnel, only a solid wall of white consuming
everything in its path only hundreds of yards down the
street and moving toward me. I ran back into the house
to collect my new family to try and make it to the
storm cellar whose entrance was outside. We never made
it out of the house before the monster arrived. My
wife, infant daughter, and I rode the storm out in a
middle closet, downstairs. Our house busted up and
split down the middle. Pretty much a scary event!
Thought we were gonna die, but was a little early on
that… I remember those moans and distressed voices
coming from the church rubble after the storm
moved-on. There were a couple of deaths in the
sanctuary, there, where the walls had failed. And so on
like so many other folks’ stories from that evening.
I do have a few pictures from that event that I have
scanned to jpeg, but they are mainly of the house and
a few of the weather office being reassembled (Placing
the radar back up on its tower!). Finding them might
be an issue… Anyway, the offer is there if you are
still building the historical site for those of us
still alive to even remember the storm. Most of the
weather crew that manned the Centreville radar site
during that period have passed.
I retired from the National Weather Service in Mobile,
just three years ago. I only worked and lived in Brent
and Centreville for two years, but long enuf to build
a couple of weather memories that have lasted
forever…
Aside from the Brent maxi-tornado, I distinctly
remember working the radar that very long and deadly
night of the tornado outbreak of April, 1974. That was
one hellish night to be part of… I saw and reported
a lot of active things that night that I never dreamed
existed and nothing since then has compared. I say
that after having worked the radars on the Florida and
Alabama Gulf coasts through decades of lots of healthy
and occasionally noteworthy tropical events. But, the
Brent storm ranks as number one in my career
experience. You see, being a front-line, hands-on
career weatherman (Not TV or radio variety!) and
sitting right smack dab in the middle of an F4 funnel
with your wife and infant daughter squeezed in the
smallest human ball we could get into is akin to an
avid astronomer being hit by a meteor…
PS A sidebar to the story of that night, my father, a
weatherman for the National Weather Service, himself,
was on duty at the weather office at the Birmingham
Airport that very night the Brent tornado came to
town. We had lots of things to talk about!
———-
By: James Spann, Chief Meteorologist, abc 33/40, Birmingham, ALA.
On May 27, 1973 I had just ended my junior year in high school (I attended Tuscaloosa High School; not many of us Black Bears still around, you know), and as usual I was glued to my amateur radio gear, helping to activate the West Alabama Emergency Net on 146.82 MHz since severe weather was breaking out. Most of the action during the afternoon was a little north and east of Tuscaloosa; word came in that a tornado had touched down in the Center Point section of Birmingham with very significant damage.
Then, around 5:30, word was received that a tornado had touched down just northeast of Demopolis. We followed the progress of that storm very closely; it would be one that made May 27, 1973 a red letter day in Alabama weather history. That tornado stayed on the ground for around two hours, hitting Greensboro and Brent head on. It even took out the old National Weather Service radar facility just southwest of Brent in Bibb County. The twister stayed down until it reached the western slope of Mount Cheaha.
Calls for help were coming in to the Tuscaloosa Civil Defense office, and we responded to the call. I rode down U.S. 82 with a group of other amateur radio operators from Tuscaloosa; our destination was Brent. My heart was racing since I had really never seen serious tornado damage before, and I had no idea what to expect.
We rolled into Brent, and police directed us to the National Guard Armory, which was being used as a temporary disaster headquarters. I will never forget the eerie darkness, the strange odor, and the sense of shock in the eyes of the people who lived there. Five people died in Brent, including one man, Andrew Mitchell, who was attending services at the Brent Baptist Church. I wound up staying in the Brent/Centreville area for four days handling health and welfare traffic, and helping with other communication needs. The sights and sounds made a remarkable impact on my life, and to this day I look back on May 27, 1973 just like it was yesterday.
———-
By: Eleita Dunlap Kinard
It was my brother that was running down the highway to check on our family. They lived at the bridge below Brent. The Dunlap family. Today I am sad to say that both my parents are gone and have been for nearly 20 yrs. My sweet “Brother”{as he was called}, went to be with the Lord on Dec 3rd this past yr. I was living with my husband and children about 1 mile past the weather station on Hwy 25, but was at my father-in-laws house that is within sight of the station. We were getting the children out of the car and into the basement when the storm hit the weather station and we saw the ball on the tower go flying across the road. I ran to the phone to call my dad and tell him to take cover. My mom and he got under the bed and that was the only piece of furniture in the house that was not moved.
I have so many memories and stories to tell like so many others. By the grace of the heavenly Father we didn’t lose many people for the size and force of that storm. I will forever remember what that cloud looked like and the sound as well.
Thank you for mentioning my brother and for all the memories it brought back, however painful they might be.
More from Mrs. Kinard:
We were headed into the neighbors basement, but prior to that we had been riding around with the kids to get an ice cream and we saw the dark cloud approaching as we were headed home. We lived at that time about a mile past the weather station on out 25. We were living in a mobile home at the time and as we passed what was known back then as “the green onion”, a business on 25, I said to my husband that I believed that the cloud contained a tornado. I had lived near Baton Rouge as a child and had already been in one. My husband said he didn’t think it was, but as we neared our home we looked to the left of hwy 25 and could see objects up in the cloud in behind Glen’s grandfathers house. We pulled into the yard and Glen ran in the house to turn off the air conditioner, and unplug the tv{that’s what you did back then in a storm}. By the time we turned around to go back towards his parents house near the station, the cloud looked like it was following us and we were scared to death. We arrived at this parents home and were rushing to get the kids to safety, when we heard what sounded like a roar, not a train, as I have heard, but a very loud low pitch roar. My husband and father-in-law were standing on the carport, and I was standing in the kitchen door and saw the tornado hit the weather station. By the time we all got inside it was mostly gone. The lightning was like nothing we had ever seen and still haven’t to this day. The whole sky was the blackest we had ever seen in between lightning strikes. It was something that I hope I never experience again. When you think back at how close we were and how good God is, you stand amazed.
———-
By Mike Oakley
Awesome story. John Brasher is an old friend who worked at The Centreville Press, which was owned by my family. He was a talented writer and photographer. His car was “the sexy European,” Lincoln-Mercury Capri, which I later bought and loved. My brother and I followed John around the newspaper and he was an inspiration to us both. He taught us tips for darkroom and photography work.
Those of us who were involved in the ‘73 tornado and its aftermath will never be the same. The city of Brent, was totally destroyed. Most of its historic houses were blown away and Centreville suffered as well. My dad, brother and I stayed up all night helping look for survivors. The destruction was shocking. I worked on clean-up crews and had a workers permit to get through the National Guard barriers and will never forget one minute of the ordeal. Thanks for the story and the memories.
———-
I and my family were driving back to Tuscaloosa from Opelika on that Sunday afternoon. I had turned 12 years old the day before and I still remember what happened just like it was yesterday.
We were traveling down Hwy. 82 coming into Centreville when we saw the blackest cloud we had ever seen. We thought we were going to miss the storm until we turned left by the Cahaba River, passed by Twix and Tween barbeque and about a half a mile later all heck broke loose. We were in a Chevrolet station wagon. It was me, my two brothers, my mom and dad and our dog. When we topped the hill, there was a Texaco station to the left. We looked over and there was a wall of debris coming right at us. The tornado was a mile wide at that point and we had no idea we were driving right into it. Billboards were hitting the ground all around us. We got down as low as we could in the car and held on. You could feel the car trying to turn over but it stayed upright.
We were as much in the center of that tornado as we could be. I watched as everything around us was destroyed. Our car was destroyed. Two by fours through the tires and radiator. All the windows on the left side of the car were gone only to have mud, grass, pine needles and other debris about an inch thick on the inside of the windows on the right side of the car. I sit here and still remember the smell in the air. No one was hurt in our car. We had glass and mud and other debris in our clothes and underwear but we were all fine. It truly was a miracle.
Shortly after the storm a young man came running by our car and he was crying. He stopped and asked if we were alright. We told him we were fine and asked if he was ok. He looked like he was in shock. He was running to get help because he was at the Brent Baptist Church and he said “the whole roof just fell in on the congregation”. I found out later that people died in that church. He took off running and I still remember him. I have always wondered who he was. We were in our car for at least two hours before the rescue people could dig through the piles of debris to get to us. The National Guard or State Troopers commandeered us a room at what was the Cinderella Motel. We were able to get out of the rain and get ourselves together. There was no power and some minor damage to the motel but it felt safe after what we had been through.
My dad stood beside Hwy. 82 and found a man driving through to Tuscaloosa. He gave him a note to call my uncle with my uncles phone number to tell him what happened and to please come get us. That wonderful man called my uncle and he showed up later to pick us up to take us back home. It is hard to believe I turned 47 years old yesterday and I remember every detail of that day.
