Last month I was visiting in Pennsylvania, and my cousin was kind enough to show me the way to Chartiers Hill. I must have been on that road as a kid. Back then, on hot humid summer evenings, after the supper dishes were done our family would go for a ride in the station wagon. We would cruise around until sunset, up, down and around the hills and hollows near the Mon River, trying to catch a cool breeze. At least one of those explorations would have gone through Chartiers Hill. At that time I didn't realize that two decades before then Chartiers Hill had been struck by one of the most powerful, long-lived and deadly tornadoes on record in Pennsylvania.
The scene above is viewed from near the top of the hill, standing in what had been the school playground. The left half of the scene faces north while the right half faces northeast. The path of the June 23, 1944 storm was from northwest to southeast, so the tornado was traveling from left to right in the scene above. The area in the foreground escaped. But along the lower part of the main road, from the curve to above where the young man is riding an ATV, it was total destruction. The company store (general store) stood there. Rows of houses extended off of that part of the main road, one row on the left and two rows on the right.
Chartiers Hill is a bluff of land standing between hollows that are more than 200 feet deep. Castile Hollow lies off to the left of the picture. Ahead as well as off to the right is the valley of the South Fork of Ten Mile Creek. The South Fork curves 90 degrees around Chartiers Hill, just as the road ahead in the picture curves sharply to the left. The road drops down to Castile Hollow, then turns right to meet the South Fork. Aerial surveys just after the storm showed a nearly continuous 80-mile path extending between the West Virginia and the Maryland panhandles. Naturally, emphasis was on the individual segments of structural damage and deaths. On this segment the starting point for death and destruction was Castile Hollow.
I grew up in Hiller, about 7 or 8 miles northeast of Chartiers Hill. At the end of my earlier post, there is a link to recollections from 1944 about how debris lifted by the tornado fell in my old neighborhood. I commented that it was only after reading about that I appreciated what must have been the large-supercell nature of the storm. Though the storm was moving from northwest to southeast, the fuel for the storm, the warm moist air, was entering from the southwest, traveling from lower left to upper right in the picture above.
Emerald Street branches diagonally off of the main road, toward the southeast, roughly parallel to the path of the tornado. There is no outlet because the street ends before it reaches the steep hill down to the South Fork. Before the tornado there were about 16 houses on this street, eight on each side.
The house farthest away, near the end of Emerald Street, is the size of the pre-tornado houses. That house was relatively lucky. The tornado only took it's roof. Perhaps the proximity and orientation of the South Fork valley gave some respite at the very end from the intensity of the tornado. The original version of the house next door was where Eileen Sullenbarger grew up. I was fortunate to meet and talk with Eileen's son, Art. In 1994, on the 50th anniversary of the tornado, Eileen's story of survival was reported in the Washington, Pa, Observer-Reporter. Looking at today's house, the outline of the original house can be seen in the wing that extends toward the street. From the other side, you can identify by the style of concrete block the part of the basement wall that stayed in place when Eileen's house was torn from its foundation.
When it comes to whether a storm might manage to produce a tornado, one of the key environmental parameters is high humidity. Southwest Pennsylvania and the adjacent parts of West Virginia and Maryland are often spared in the springtime; the dewpoint never quite gets high enough. But the summer can be a different story. There's less of a need in summer to transport moisture rapidly north from the Gulf of Mexico; often the high humidity has been in place for several days. Fortunately, having all of the other ingredients come together, as they did in 1944, is relatively rare. Today's Storm Prediction Center does a great job of anticipating the possibilities. Let's hope the threats continue to be rare.
