The US Town Blitzed By Two Tornadoes in One Day

A small country town, Tanner, Alabama is like 90% of places you’ve ever seen in the American Deep South, and if it weren’t for one day in 1974, most people outside of its county might never have even heard of it.

Because in 1974, Tanner suffered a natural disaster so unique that it may never happen again in our recorded history.

In a single afternoon this little community was devastated during an event that would redefine what tornado outbreaks looked like in the US.

But what conditions caused such an incredible weather event? Why is it considered controversial among experts? And how does a community rebuild itself when the impossible comes to its door?

A devastating one-two punch, with apocalyptic results. A literal perfect storm. Tanner’s darkest day.

Tanner and Tornadoes – Just an Ordinary Town?

This is Tanner, Alabama. The three things that people care about the most here are God, family, and American football, in that order. But given how religious this small Alabama town is, what came in April of 1974 must have felt like divine punishment.

Tanner was first settled along the Louisville and Nashville Railroad in the 19th century. It was first known as McDonald’s station—no, we’re not jabbing at America with stereotypes, that was actually what they called the place. Soon after though, the name would change to Rowland, establishing a post office in 1878, which as American towns go, makes it pretty old.

In 1913, the Tanner post office was also founded; it was named after Samuel Tanner, who happened to be the first mayor of the nearby city of Athens to the North. The name ended up sticking, with Tanner being relatively close to Athens, and both of them being within the metro area of Huntsville, one of Alabama’s biggest cities. The mighty Tennessee river’s tide flows through this part of Northern Alabama on its way to Chattanooga and beyond.

This river would end up acting as a foreboding border on that fateful day in ‘74, promising the destruction to come.

Tanner doesn’t really stand out from the rest of Alabama, let alone the rest of the USA. It has a post office and a high school, a population of around 2,000 people, the median income is approximately $80,000 a year, and for all intents and purposes, it’s like any other slightly rural Bible Belt town, with its own distinct stories, myths, and dramas. The post office was once robbed, someone was struck by lightning back in 1913, and Reshard Langford the ex-football player is the town’s claim to fame. See what we mean?

It was a small-town country life, a simple life. A good life.

But within the span of one afternoon, this ceased to be, as most people’s lives in this little God-fearing community were figuratively, and in some cases literally, turned upside down.

You see… Alabama was in Tornado country.

Whilst the better known “Tornado Alley” exists to its West and conjures up twisters that would put The Wizard of Oz to shame, the lesser-discussed “Dixie Alley” enshrouding most of Alabama and Mississippi has a dark legacy all its own.

Warm air from the Gulf of Mexico (or Gulf of America, if you’re so inclined) is pushed inland into Alabama and this hot, moist air can create the literal perfect storm, mimicking the conditions needed to cause some of the most widespread and violent tornado outbreaks in the United States.

Tornadoes in Alabama are therefore nothing new; its twister season lasts from roughly March to May and it has averaged about 40 tornadoes a year since 1950, although that number appears to be creeping upwards every year as tornado detection systems improve, and our planet continues to warm up.

So, you’d assume that those in a little place like Tanner, Alabama had seen it all before, and you’d be right. About once in a generation or two across the land, there would be a particularly violent series of more tornadoes than was otherwise common. The stars align in the worst way, and the perfect conditions for the creation of supercells—the massive storms where tornadoes come from—are met. That warm air that travels from the gulf can meet those storm systems, which causes an updraft and a vertical column of air begins to spin owing to the different pressures. This is a supercell; that central vortex touches down on the ground and voila, tornado.

And this is also a good moment to talk about how tornadoes are measured. Which is actually not related to wind speed, but damage. The Enhanced Fujita scale—whose namesake invented it—goes up on a scale from one to five based on the severity of the damage a tornado causes. Now whilst this broadly aligns with wind speed, as the faster tornadoes spin, the more damage they tend to do, some fast tornadoes don’t cause much damage and are classified lower because they don’t travel through built-up areas.

In this sense, think of the EF scale almost like measuring the societal impact that a tornado has through its destruction. An EF0 you might barely notice. An EF5 will sweep the foundation of buildings clean, correlating to wind speeds in the hundreds of miles per hour.

And some of those violent tornadoes high up on the EF scale have touched down in Alabama over the years, and these once-in-a-generation “super outbreaks” have affected it too. In Dixie Alley, tornadoes can also be uniquely dangerous as well, as the increased humidity and moisture commonly causes the storms to become wrapped in rain, lowering the visibility of them, especially in the dark. What this can sometimes mean is that tornadoes can’t even be seen with the naked eye in some cases until it is already far too late and it is already on top of you.

These kinds of tornado super outbreaks have continued to terrorise Alabama across the decades. The first recorded “super outbreak” came in early 1884, known as “the enigma outbreak,” where 60 tornadoes travelled from Alabama into the Carolinas, causing widespread mayhem. There was another in 1932, in 1974, and most recently in 2011.

But the term “super outbreak” only really exists because of what happened on April 3rd, 1974, and for the little community residing in Tanner, it would be a day that nobody who experienced it could ever forget.

Lightning Strikes Twice – The Twin Tornadoes

So, what happened on the days of the super outbreak across 1974 on both April 3rd and April 4th?

Well, the day started out much like any other. It was a Wednesday, and people were going about their daily lives. Work, school, family, football, maybe church. It was right in the middle of tornado season, and the Alabamans were battening down the hatches.

The previous night on April 2nd, two EF2 tornadoes had blustered through nearby to Huntsville, damaging many mobile homes and even causing one fatality. But weather experts and locals knew that wouldn’t be the end of it… not even close. They were assessing the meteorological equipment to help track and predict oncoming storms; the pressure was very low. Something was coming.

But it wasn’t just something big, it was something unheard of. The entire country was about to bear witness to mother nature’s wrath.

Severe warnings were flagging up all over the Eastern half of the United States. And then the sky exploded into the largest tornado outbreak ever seen at the time.

Across the nation, a huge area was affected by severe weather warnings and tornado breakouts throughout the day. In total, almost 150 tornadoes would touch down across the United States. At that time, it was the most ever recorded in a single outbreak. They were spread across the US, from down in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, all the way up North to Illinois and Michigan. This was a massive weather event unlike anything any person living in small-town USA had ever seen before.

30 of the tornadoes that touched down were classified as “violent,” comprising of 23 EF4s and seven—yes, seven—EF5s. It’s not all that common to get one EF5 rated tornado in an entire year; this outbreak produced seven in a little over a day.

At least eight tornadoes of varying sizes would touch down in the afternoon inside Alabama, with four of them being what are reported as “extremely intense and long-lived storms.” At 4:30 p.m. Central Daylight Time, a brief tornado touched down in the Concord area just eight miles West of the major metropolitan area of Birmingham, one of Alabama’s largest cities. It caused damage, but fortunately no casualties.

Then another landed in Calhoun County, and by 6:30 p.m. a third had hit Cherokee County, injuring 20 people. But this was all pretty small fry compared with what was already starting to touch down elsewhere.

A tornado emerged in Needmore, just east of Newburg sometime after 5:15 p.m. and it started moving northeast, with the cities of Decatur and Huntsville looming on the horizon. It appeared to already be at an EF5 intensity when it made contact with the ground as it mangled everything in its way. Reports at the time stated that the tornado was, quoting here:

“Big and powerful and taking everything in its path.”

Cars were being tossed hundreds of metres like toys as they were turned into little more than scrap metal. The ground was scoured by the vortex, which also managed to topple a two-kilometre square forest almost completely. The reddish soil was left stuck to the bare wood of the trees with the bark having been stripped off of many of them. Its path of destruction continued, narrowly missing the centre of Decatur and crossing the Tennessee river, but one place was sat square in its path: Tanner.

It was total carnage. The city was very nearly destroyed by the violent tornado as it ripped through the community. Many buildings were completely flattened, and some had their concrete foundations swept clean by the twister.

One grim picture shows a bathtub half impaled into the ground after being flung into a different area entirely. Given that it’s common advice to hide in a bathtub in the event of a tornado, let’s hope that it wasn’t full when it was picked up by the vortex. It only took about an hour, but by the time that the Tanner tornado had passed overhead, it had left a scar in the landscape 52 miles long and over 450 metres wide, finally settling and dissipating after it had damaged the small town of Harvest.

And Tanner was in total ruins. All in all, 28 people had been killed by this behemoth, and another 267 were injured. Considering it thankfully didn’t hit any major population centres, that is still a lot of casualties for little Tanner and the other small communities it ravaged.

Given the scale of the destruction, wind speeds were estimated to be well in excess of 200 miles per hour.

But this is the part where you feel your stomach bottom out and the dread starts to fill your mind, because you can see how long is left—you know that’s not all.

The worst was yet to come for Tanner.

Because just half an hour after the Tanner tornado had crossed the Tennessee river and decimated the small community, lightning struck twice.

Another massive twister had formed from the same supercell, this time on Tanner’s side of the river, and it was also trending straight towards the small town in a nearly identical path to its predecessor. What happened next can only be described as apocalyptic levels of bedlam. Survivors were still crawling out of what remained of their homes, thanking their lucky stars that they were still alive, only to have another monster swallow the town.

In total, this second tornado, also over 450 metres wide, travelled for over 80 miles and even crossed the border into Tennessee before it too eventually dissipated. The small suburb of Harvest wasn’t spared either; it too was struck by this second EF5, this time directly, and was totally wrecked. Capshaw was the only other area to be hit by both tornadoes.

In total, 16 people lost their lives to the second twister, with another 190 injured. It’s astonishing more people weren’t killed.

And as you could imagine, Tanner was a complete disaster zone. In one home alone up to 19 people had been hurt by the second tornado. In a cruel irony, a man who had been injured by the first vortex had been taken to a church within Tanner to recover until medical help could arrive. He never got the chance when the second tornado destroyed the building completely, killing him just half an hour later.

People had been sucked out of their homes never to be seen again; others had splinters travel at hundreds of miles an hour into their bodies, cutting their lives short.

Many were trying to escape the debris and destruction of the first tornado when the second one hit. And rescue efforts for the first tornado were severely hampered by the second. You know, because it’s a bit difficult to administer first aid and find survivors when a house falls on you.

So many people were injured overall—not just from the Tanner tornadoes but others too—that hospitals like Athens in Limestone County had to turn patients away and send them to Decatur Hospital instead; meanwhile Huntsville had more patients than it could handle. It would later be understood that the second tornado’s path only differed from the first by around three kilometres.

Do you understand how extraordinarily miniscule the chances of that happening really are? It’s exceedingly rare for a settlement to be directly impacted by more than one F5 tornado ever because they’re usually so rare. And Tanner was hit by two in half an hour.

First, a storm has to be large enough and have the conditions present to create a supercell. Then that supercell needs to create not just one, but two tornadoes of equal destructive capability. Then both of those tornadoes have to hit more or less the same area at the same time, and travel a similar path without deviating or getting weaker.

It’s a statistical anomaly; the chances must be billions to one. Tanner was undoubtedly the unluckiest place on our entire planet for someone to be on that day in 1974. Even multiple F5 tornadoes created by the same supercell storm rarely if ever land in the same place at the same time, and yet Tanner, Capshaw and Harvest took both head on.

There was even another EF5 from that day that passed very close to Decatur and, if it hadn’t dissipated, was on a direct collision course for Huntsville itself. It alone also killed 28 and injured another 272 people, totally levelling the town of Guin in the process. This is how tornadoes from the same storms are supposed to behave. They are cousins, brothers at best, but the two Tanner twisters were a hideous pair of identical twins.

Around half of Alabama’s deaths and injuries that day were attributed to both Tanner tornadoes, with 86 people losing their lives across the state in total, and almost 1,000 injured. Limestone County (which is where Tanner is) and Madison County were hit the hardest, but fourteen other counties suffered major destruction. Other areas like Hazel Green were also severely damaged. 1,100 buildings had been completely demolished, 200 mobile homes were in ruins and numerous motor vehicles were rendered little more than junk.

The damage ended up costing $50 million dollars to fix, which adjusted for inflation would be over $323 million dollars today. The super outbreak of 1974 ended early the following morning on the fourth of April, with a death toll of 335 and thousands injured across the US.

And at the end of it all, Tanner was the one unfortunate enough to be given the title of the first place to be hit by two EF5 strength tornadoes in a single day.

Or was it?

Because in the years since there has been some controversy about this. The level of damage in some areas was actually pretty hard to measure. Unless it was clear from the distinct path of either tornado, or you just happened to be there in the half an hour between them both to assess the damage, it could be pretty hard to tell which tornado caused which damage.

Either or both could have flung cars hundreds of metres, for example. And that has caused some people within the meteorological community to attempt to recategorize one of the two tornadoes with an EF4 rating, citing that the damage was lesser to enough of an extent to make this distinction. Now because tornado science can sometimes be as exact as a one-eyed stormtrooper, this is disputed, and many classifications for what is considered an EF5 are done on more of a consensus basis from weather experts across the United States.

Overall, though, the ranking doesn’t really matter, but the damage does. Whether Tanner gets that distinction of being the first one to be hit by two F5s in a day or not, the community was in ruins, families and homes had been literally torn apart, and people had died or suffered life-changing injuries. Could Tanner ever recover from such a devastating event?

Rebuilding Tanner – A Lasting Trauma

Well, actually, yes. Since the two Tanner tornadoes and the super outbreak of 1974, it has largely gone back to the way it always was: a sleepy rural Alabama town that loves its football as much as it loves its church. The cleanup took a while, but the local communities rallied around the devastated towns and eventually got them back on their feet. However, the enduring legacy of April 3rd, 1974 remains in the area, as does the trauma that it caused.

Years after the storm is gone, buildings, cars and businesses can be rebuilt, replaced like it never happened. Family and friends cannot.

Shelia Lankster Odom was 11 years old at the time of the Tanner tornadoes. Looking back half a century later, she put it best, quote:

“God had his hand on all of us that night, a lot of lives were changed in a moment. We had to rebuild ours.”

Even now many in the local area refer to events as before and after that day in April, as a marker on this small part of Northern Alabama’s own historical timeline, something gouged into the subconscious of those who were present that day as long as they’ll live.

But, almost as if to cement Tanner’s legacy of being the unluckiest place to live in the whole of the USA, the story, unbelievably, doesn’t end there. Remember how we said there was another super outbreak in 2011? In an astonishing coincidence that will likely never happen again, Tanner was hit for a third time with an EF5 tornado, when the Hackleburg tornado—as it would become known—crashed through the town, levelling it for the third time in 50 years.

Several homes, a mobile home park and a church that were all destroyed in 1974 were once again flattened to nothing in 2011. It too followed a similar path to the previous twins, actually almost perfectly travelling through the middle of the previous two tornadoes’ recorded paths. It killed 72 people in total and injured around 150. 2011 would take over as the USA’s deadliest and biggest super outbreak.

Today, a memorial sits in Limestone County honouring the victims that were lost in 2011, 1974 and all of the tornadoes in the county’s recorded history. The folks living there endure. They rebuild. And they remember the ones they lost along the way to nature’s fickle wrath.

And with any luck—which they desperately deserve—they won’t have to rebuild again. But that seems unlikely. The last time Alabama had a year below its current average for number of tornadoes was 2015. 2022 had Alabama’s 2nd highest number of twisters ever after 2011. 2023 is 4th highest. 2021, 2020 and 2024 are also all in the top ten. It could be advances in technology are allowing us to see more tornadoes including very minor ones when they happen, or it could be that Alabama’s tornado problem is getting worse.

Given the timelines around super outbreaks, Alabama isn’t due one for another couple of decades, but if the current pattern continues, Tanner could once again find itself staring down a whirling vortex of destruction.

Let’s hope lightning doesn’t strike a fourth time.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Tanner, Alabama known for?

Tanner, Alabama is known for being the town hit by two F5 tornadoes in one day on April 3, 1974.

How many tornadoes touched down in Alabama on April 3, 1974?

Eight tornadoes of varying sizes touched down in Alabama on April 3, 1974.

What was the path length and width of the first tornado that hit Tanner?

The first tornado that hit Tanner had a path length of 52 miles and a width of over 450 meters.

How many people were killed and injured by the first tornado in Tanner?

The first tornado in Tanner killed 28 people and injured 267 others.

What was the path length and width of the second tornado that hit Tanner?

The second tornado that hit Tanner traveled for over 80 miles and was over 450 meters wide.

How many people were killed and injured by the second tornado in Tanner?

The second tornado in Tanner killed 16 people and injured 190 others.

What was the total damage cost from the 1974 tornado outbreak in Alabama?

The damage from the 1974 tornado outbreak in Alabama cost $50 million dollars, which is over $323 million dollars today when adjusted for inflation.

How many tornadoes were there in the 1974 super outbreak across the United States?

Almost 150 tornadoes touched down across the United States during the 1974 super outbreak.

What is the Enhanced Fujita scale?

The Enhanced Fujita scale measures tornadoes based on the severity of the damage they cause, ranging from EF0 to EF5.

What is the significance of the 1974 tornado outbreak for Tanner, Alabama?

The 1974 tornado outbreak is significant for Tanner, Alabama because it was the first place to be hit by two EF5 strength tornadoes in a single day.

Sources

• Original Places video: The US Town Blitzed By Two Tornadoes in One Day
• Hero image source by openverse, cc0.