They Hoped for a Storm

The day had been muggy. Mining families, staring from the windows of their shabby-colored clapboard houses, were pleased to see the black clouds rolling up, with lightning flaring off in the distance. They hoped for a storm, as people do, to break the humid spell. At 8:30 p.m., in the 25 drab company houses that front on U.S. Route 19 as it climbs through Pleasant Hill, W. Va., supper was over, the dishes done, and the youngest children tucked away in bed. At 8:50 the windows rattled menacingly, like a snake giving warning. At 8:51 the storm came.

Out of the north, in a long thin funnel, white to greasy green in color, the storm poured through, with thunderous roar and a long trail of smoke like an express train. It hit Joetown, then Oakdale, then swept Pleasant Hill. Fifteen of the 25 houses toppled as if they had been stepped on. Stoves, mattresses and tables poured down onto Route 19. Porches and roofs, caught in the swirl, splashed in the debris of Pleasant Hill, and then the tornado ground on through West Virginia.

State Trooper G. F. Randall, alone inside a concrete building beside the steel radio tower of the West Virginia State Police got up to close a window against the wind, and saw the spiral-shaped cone sweeping over the hill toward him. "As it got closer I could see it was filled with wood, trees and outhouses. It seemed to be coming directly toward me. I was so damned interested I never moved."

The tornado smashed in, the high steel pyramid doubled into an inverted-V. Randall straightened up, unhurt. Up Shinns Run, the storm swirled across the countryside in a path 300 yards wide, leveling trees, houses and fences as if an army of bulldozers had streaked through the valley. At Boothsville, the tornado uprooted a new $250,000 pumping station, and slammed it against a hillside. An 80-lb. wrench lit in a field a half-mile away. Rescue workers counted 58 dead from the "Shinnston Tornado," worst in West Virginia's history.

Fellow on a Furlough. But the Shinnston was just one of several tornadoes that raced up and down the Monongahela Valley one night last week, beginning near Pittsburgh and ending at Clarksburg, W. Va. Meteorologists say tornadoes usually spend themselves in 15 or 20 miles; these tornadoes together, striking almost simultaneously, laid waste a 100-mile area. Total dead: 151.

In Chartiers, Pa., where a mine explosion had killed six a fortnight earlier, eleven more people died in the tornado. Private John Barnish, home on furlough, had lost his father when the explosion laid waste the little town. After the tornado. Private Barnish had his mother and a sister, 12, to bury.

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