I was sorry to read this morning about the author of the “Ten Mile Creek Country” blog. Only recently one of his older posts caught my eye. That post includes a brief summary about tornadoes that struck Southwestern Pennsylvania on the evening of June 23, 1944. I don't remember having seen before the photo in that post showing the devastation at Chartiers (Lat. 39.961N, Lon. 80.051W). Over the years I probably heard bits and pieces about twisters, but didn't connect them. I recall seeing 30 or 40 years ago a map of paths of deadly tornadoes across the entire country. There were just a few short lines in Southwestern Pennsylvania—anemic compared to the major events farther west. That particular graphic may have been misleading.
Since coming across the “Ten Mile Creek Country” post, I've been searching online for more information. The closest thing to the original surveys is the Monthly Weather Review report on tornadoes during 1944. That report references a survey by the Weather Bureau in Pittsburgh. The tornado in Greene County was part of a path of destruction that extended 80 miles from near Wellsburg [between Wheeling and Steubenville, on the West Virginia side of the Ohio] to western Maryland. That path was flanked by three parallel paths: two on the north and one on the south. According to MWR, “Observers who witnessed the paths of the tornadoes from the air stated that there were some meanderings but the general direction was from northwest to southeast, and the paths looked as though huge rollers had flattened everything in their way.” It should be noted that before crossing into Greene County, the storm would have passed over very rural parts of Washington County. Then near Chartiers, it would have encountered surface elevations rapidly fluctuating from about 800 feet along the South Fork of Tenmile Creek to over 1100 feet on the surrounding hills.
The Pennsylvania Weather Book has a description of this event. Some of the details, including the F4 rating, are apparently based on a review published by Grazulis in 1993. The online follow-up by Grazulis, The Tornado Project, lists the Chartiers tornado among the deadliest tornadoes in Pennsylvania. I don't have access to the 1993 publication, and thus no knowledge about its conclusions regarding path length. But it is interesting that the associated time (6:11 pm) provided at the online site corresponds to the start of the path at Wellsburg. In Greene County the time was, according to online newspaper reminiscences, "a little after 8 p.m."
A more recent post on the “Ten Mile Creek Country” blog alerted readers to the availability of aerial photographs covering Pennsylvania. Comparing a photo of the area taken 5 years before the tornado with one taken 14 years after, you can see which structures were destroyed. Online newspaper reminiscences record that one of the structures destroyed was the company store. This might explain an observation from Hiller, 7 miles to the northeast, where strips of clothing fell from the sky (newspaper summary at Glenn Tunney's site). The terminus of the debris would seem to offer pre-radar confirmation, if it were not already obviously the case, that the Greene County tornado was associated with a large, long-lived, rotating supercell.
My grandparents house in Charteirs was one of the 53 homes destroyed in the 1944 tornado. Luckily, only my grandmother and my mom's youngest brother were home at the time the tornado hit. My grandmother was hurt pretty badly and was in the hospital for a while. My uncle was 18 months old and was discovered more than one hundred yards from his home, by his grandfather. He miraculously survived. I believe ten people were killed in Chartiers.
ReplyDeleteI was 3 years old at the time. And my mother Josephine Barnhart was killed in that tornado. My father , Walter Barnhart, myself and my brother Lloyd Cannon survived , but had injuries that required hospitalization. I was not fouinf until 3 days later a mile away from our home by a soldier coming home on leave from the Army. I was to meet him many years later as he was a neighbor where we moved to in North Scottdale.
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