Published: July 11, 2008 05:47 am      

Witnesses to 1947 tornado share stories

Survivors of the April 1947 tornado that demolished Woodward gathered Thursday afternoon at the Plains Indians and Pioneers Museum to relate their experiences in a panel discussion as part of Northwest Oklahoma State University’s “Oklahoma Northwest” course on area history.

Wilma Nelson was 22 years old at the time. She described the experience as “a night you can’t forget,” though, Nelson said, “you might like to.”

Melvin Nix, then 33, expressed a similar sentiment.

“It was a terrible thing, and we hope to never have another one,” Nix said.

Nelson and fellow survivor Pauline Benbrook remembered an electrical storm of titanic duration and intensity.

“I’d never seen such lightning or heard such thunder,” Nelson said.

“That whole evening--I think about it every time we have a storm--a constant flicker of electricity, lightning,” Benbrook recalled.

Bill Heaton, whose father was then Woodward County Treasurer, was 16 and a junior in high school at the time of the storm. He was at a friend’s house when the tornado struck.

“[I] jerked the front door open...and every window in the house went out--just exploded,” Heaton said.

Nix was at a pool hall downtown.

“When I went out to get in the car it was gone,” Nix said. “I looked down the street about a block and there it was on the sidewalk.”

Benbrook was at home on 18th street, along with her mother, when the tornado tore off the roof of the house.

“It just lifted up that entire roof on that house and we never saw it again,” she said. “I looked up after it had happened and I said, ‘Mother, there’s no roof on the house.’”

The panelists recalled Woodward received no warning of the impending storm, as phones were out due to a telephone workers’ strike and weather bureau officials opted not to warn the town because they decided there was nothing they could do, and warning residents would only frighten everyone.

According to the museum’s website, the tornado’s width peaked at 1.8 miles and it traveled 170 miles without leaving the ground.

At the time, experts with the Kansas City weather bureau reported rotation at the tornado’s core reached speeds of about 450 miles per hour. At its greatest speed, the tornado exerted an estimated 600 pounds of pressure per square foot on everything it touched.

The storm killed at least 107 people in and around Woodward and injured nearly 1,000 more.

“Across the street from us there was two people killed,” Nix told the class.

Benbrook and Nelson recalled the scene that night at the hospital.

“They had people on the front porch,” Nelson said. “There were people on the lawn moaning and crying.”

“People were dying and crying and wanting help,” Benbrook said.

Damage estimates at the time put the total dollar amount in the Woodward area at approximately $11.7 million, a sum all the more impressive when one remembers the tornado struck in 1947.