Worcester tornado remains New England's most deadly and destructive 70 years later
WORCESTER - Friday is the 70th anniversary of the infamous Worcester tornado, the most destructive and deadly New England tornado in recorded history.
The tornado formed in Petersham and was on the ground for 84 minutes, taking 94 lives.
Early on June 9th, 1953, meteorologists at the weather bureau office at Logan Airport in Boston sat down to work on their morning forecast. They saw the news reports of a tornado outbreak the prior day in the midwest, including a twister that hit the city of Flint, Michigan. They were confident that this day would be busy.
As the discussion circled the forecast table, a meteorologist asked if they should include the word 'tornado' today.
"In those days you didn't use the word tornado because it was thought to incite panic," Joe Dellicarpini, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Norton told WBZ-TV. "Forecasting, especially severe weather forecasting, was in its infancy in those days."
Instead, the forecasters went with "thunderstorms possible, some locally severe."
That turned out to be an incredible understatement.
At about 4:25 p.m., a tornado dropped from the clouds, not far from the Quabbin Reservoir in Petersham. This tornado would eventually be on the ground for 84 minutes covering 46 miles, hitting cities and towns like Worcester, Shrewsbury, and Holden, before finally lifting in Framingham.
While the damage scale used to rate the tornado would not be developed until 1971, it would go on to be rated an F-4 tornado, just below the strongest tornado rating of F-5. Ninety-four people died, making it the deadliest tornado in New England history.
More than 4,000 buildings were destroyed, 1,288 people were hurt and there was $52 million in damage. That's a staggering $590 million in 2023 dollars.
A wedding dress from Worcester was found on a telephone line in Natick. Blueprints from a Worcester building were found in Duxbury and books and clothes were found in Chatham and Provincetown.
The damage was so immense and the 1950s being the height of the Cold War, survivors of the tornado thought the Soviets had attacked the area.
Forty-four miles from the tornado, a research radar in Lexington operated by MIT, captured a crude but now unmistakable hook echo. This would be one of the first times a hook echo was ever captured by a radar, but the weather service was unaware.
"There was no way to communicate that information easily to the weather service," Dellicarpini said.
It wasn't until an observer at Blue Hill Observatory noticed debris raining down from the sky.
"He called the Boston office and said, 'I think there has been a bad tornado somewhere.' After talking to the Boston office, they agreed, and they issued the first severe weather warning for New England," Dellicarpini said.
The warning would not go out until two hours *AFTER* the tornado hit.
After the Worcester tornado, a young Massachusetts Senator named John F. Kennedy was photographed surveying the damage.
In the immediate aftermath of the tornado, the federal government sped up the deployment of a national radar network.
"Today, we have much better warning systems. Better detection with doppler radar, better models that can help us anticipate these events, so the loss of life typically is much lower now," Dellicarpini told WBZ.