1966 Candlestick Park Tornado Traditional Cache
1966 Candlestick Park Tornado
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This area was hit hard in 1966, I remember still seeing twisted metal in trees when I was around 8 years old (1979)
By Bert Case
bert@wlbt.net
It was 40 years ago Friday (This story was put out in 2006)that a powerful tornado, an F-5, struck Candlestick Park Shopping Center in Jackson. It killed 12 people in the shopping center then went on a 200 mile rampage killing a total of 57 people in Mississippi. (visit link)
It was the last F-5 tornado to hit Mississippi. The first major damage done by the storm was to the then 1,500 foot tower of WLBT, which was knocked down and scattered across a field near Raymond.
The storm then came through rural Hinds County, laying out pecan trees as if they were ready for planting. It then slammed into the back wall of candlestick park shopping center, where 12 died. One of the lucky ones was Donna Durr, a school teacher, who miraculously survived along with her infant son, being lifted 75 feet into the air in a Volkswagen bug and was gently dropped back to earth.
“I turned to my son, two years old, and said oh no, we are in it. And then I had the sensation of being picked up. We were up there just floating, and I was thinking, oh no, this is it, but just as quickly as that happened then we came down just as gently as we went up,” she said.
Thirty-two-year-old Johnathan Bullock, a Madison lawyer, came to a ceremony marking the 40th anniversary of the tornado Friday because his grandfather, a promising young candidate for congress in 1966, Joe Bullock, was also sucked up in the air by the tornado in Rankin County.
“The tornado crossed his path and violently brought his car a hundred feet into the air, and when it fell, it killed him instantly,” he recalled.
Jim Butch, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Jackson, says Friday's technology would have made a 30-minute warning possible. There was no warning in 1966. The tornado was so powerful in 1966 that it took out the Caney Creek Bridge on Cooper Road which led to the shopping center. Knowing the force it would take to do that was one of the ways they determined it was an F-5 tornado, the worst. (visit link)
The National Weather Service says the only sure way to protect yourself from an F-5 tornado is to be underground.
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