Mega Tornado Outbreak of 1985

by Deb

It was May 31, 1985 and I was about 10 years old. It had been an unusually hot and humid day in PA just an hour from the Ohio border. It was a picture perfect summer day even though summer had not officially started yet. The sun was out and not a cloud in the sky until later . . .

Then sometime in the evening things changed....severe thunderstorms had developed in Ohio and were moving along a strong cold front into PA. We had been through severe storms many times before and thought this would be no different....but we sure were wrong.

First everything become eerily still with no birds in sight, no wind, and not a sound or animal anywhere. We had 2 cats which were acting very strangely. Soon after the eerie stillness, the sky turned a very funky greenish-yellow color unlike anything I had ever seen before. Then a single large hailstone fell out of the sky hitting my dad's storage shed. My dad started to go out to retrieve it when a bunch of hail stones fell from the sky. After the hail, there was an awful roaring noise unlike anything I had ever heard before. Several neighbors were outside and looking up the sky. Not long after the roaring noise started, debries began falling from sky. Among the debries were papers with addresses from Mercer, PA which is a city to the west of where we lived at the time. My uncle and grandpa found huge pieces of plywood in the woods surrounding our property. Our yard was littered with papers, shingles, insulation, etc.

There was no warning of the impending storm that could have produced a tornado until after the storm had passed. The National Weather Service has issued a watch for our area, but no warning was given until after the storm had passed of a tornado warning. The tornado watched was scheduled until 11 pm that evening and it was very hard to sleep that night after that tornado had passed over. Any thunderstorm with hail made me a bit more nervous than usual after that especially if the hail reached golf ball size.

At the time that the tornado has passed over, my parents and I had lived in a mobile home. If that tornado had touched down, we probably would not be alive today to tell about it. We were very lucky. I do not always take tornado watches and warnings seriously, but if I ever do see the signs again that I did that day back in 1985, I sure will head to the basement!