THE 1957 DALLAS TORNADO

"All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth."   Richard Avedon

This site purposely makes little effort to describe the science -- to the extent that it is understood today -- of tornadoes, but merely to document a specific storm(1). The links and references below will lead you to sources providing good explanations of tornado and severe thunderstorm meteorology plus other useful information concerning tornadoes in general, as well as dramatic images and stories.

A big tornado projects a truly impressive menace that cannot adequately be communicated by video, film, photographs, or words. It has to be seen -- preferably from close by -- to be appreciated. Many tornadoes look positively alive. The difference between seeing one on film and seeing one in real life is the difference between seeing Godzilla on film and seeing some real Godzilla in real life. Nevertheless, when people ask me what the 1957 Dallas tornado looked like I tell them they should go watch the fictional one that carries Dorothy and Toto away to Oz. The physical appearances are not exactly the same, but to this day the sight of this scariest of all movie tornadoes(2) brings back memories.

> American Meteorological Society's "Journals Online" Here are references for a couple of papers illustrating the scientific use to which data from the tornado was put:
        Wind Speed and Air Flow Patterns in the Dallas Tornado April 2, 1957 - Walter Hoecker, Jr. - August 1960
        Three-Dimensional Pressure Pattern of the Dallas Tornado And Some Resultant Implications - Walter Hoecker, Jr. - December 1961.
To access the papers, go to the site (will open in a new window). Select "Advanced Search," enter "Hoecker" for "Author Last Name" and "1957 Dallas Tornado" for "Anywhere in Article" (minus the quotes), and click "Submit Search." PDFs of the complete papers can be accessed from the search results. Even if you find the meteorology daunting, you should at least scroll to the "Concluding Remarks" sections of each paper for expert testimony as to the importance of the 1957 Dallas tornado for tornado research.

> disaster... dallas From the Dallas Morning News's dallasnews.com Web site a very abbreviated version of the WFAA television special produced in 1957 shortly after the tornado. The complete original is repetitious, melodramatic, and contains little real content other than film footage and a couple of interviews with survivors. The part with the wooden tower and the crane in view is perhaps the most famous footage of the tornado and shows it ravaging Arlington Park.

> Survivors Another dallasnews.com video associated with their fiftieth anniversary coverage, this one an interview with survivors of the tornado who lived near Edgefield and Stewart, the location where the man was killed at the gas station.

> wfaa.com Video from an April 2, 2007, WFAA news segment in which three people old enough (even older than me) to remember the storm give their recollections. The ex-WFAA reporter recounts the famous anecdote, which  began making the rounds only a day or so following the tornado, about the elderly man on the second floor of some building just rocking in his rocking chair with half the building missing.

 > KDFW Television A nice multimedia piece. Click the "Photo Gallery" link enough times (or you can probably just sit and wait) and eventually the central logo will be surrounded by thumbnails of photos, most from the official Weather Bureau report referred to often on this site. Pick a thumbnail and you can then cycle through all of the pictures. Chronologically the sequence begins with the thumbnail just to the right of the one in the upper left corner. The sequence running up and down the left side is the same (at a poorer resolution) as the one from shot from the triple underpass that is shown on the Photo Sequence 1 page. The large funnel shown beyond the church in the forth from the left thumbnail along the bottom edge is the second tornado followed by the sheriff's deputy as described on the narrative page.

 > Color film Another link to KDFW's site. After seeing news stories about the anniversary, someone remembered an old can of 8mm film stashed up in the attic. Even if you saw the snippets on the 5/7/07 Fox4 9:00 p.m. news broadcast, it is worth going to this site to watch the whole thing uncut.

> Texas Tech's WISE research lab The following are references with dates for some technical descriptions of the tornado for which, unfortunately, I do not have the sources. This information is from Texas Tech's Wind Science and Engineering Lab', which probably has copies of the reports.
        Dallas Tornado - Malcolm Harrison - April 1957
        Tornado: State of Knowledge - Edwin Kessler - April 1977

> An Engineering Assessment of Structural Damage in the Altus, OK Tornado: May 11 1982 - Timothy P. Marshall and James R. McDonald  - October 1983. Publications that are on the WISE lab's site include this PDF of a paper which, although  describing a tornado in Oklahoma, notes the significance of the 1957 Dallas tornado as science's first good opportunity for studying tornado damage to varying types of construction (if the link fails, just go to the WISE lab's site noted above and do a search for "Altus"):
 

> The Dallas Public Library's Texas/Dallas History and Archives section has the complete Weather Bureau report containing the Hoecker references above:
The tornadoes at Dallas, Tex., April 2, 1957 / a collection of reports by Walter H. Hoecker, Jr., et al. - iii, 175 pp. : maps, charts. Holdings: Item Holdings DPL Catalogue Call Number: 551.553 U58Wt. Publisher: Washington : U.S. Department of Commerce, Weather Bureau, 1960.
This is one of the richest sources of material on the tornado, although even it seems not to be entirely accurate. Don't accept the library's (very bad) photocopy; make them bring you the original. I get the impression that copies of this report are in pretty short supply. However, if you wish you now can download a PDF version by going to the KDFW site mentioned above and Clicking on the "Etc" link. Thanks to Chip Mahaney for spending the time and money to scan the library's copy and create the PDF files..

> The report, mentioned elsewhere on this site,  resulting from a U.S. Weather Bureau study of the tornado and its effects that was led by meteorologist Robert G. Beebe is included in the above DPL reference.

> On Tornado Funnels , a 1978 scientific paper which suggests a modeling strategy for tornado funnels based partly on observations of the 1957 Dallas tornado, might provide interesting reading for anyone possessing a degree in meteorology.



(1) For the meteorologically inclined, a quick summary. Obviously there was way more than adequate atmospheric moisture on (and before) April 2, apparently including an impressive surface dew point rise from 60 degrees to 70 degrees between 12:30 and 3:30 p.m. on the day of the tornado. The day was warm, even by April in North Central Texas standards. The cloud base where the tornado first formed was estimated at ~1100ft. The Lifted Index seems to have been around -7. At the 500mb level (~18,000 ft) winds of about 40mph were blowing from the south. Thus moisture, instability, and significant shear all likely were in place. In addition, a cold front was advancing from the northwest and was near the area, a stationary front ran along an east-west line virtually on top of the area (all of the 25 tornadoes in this outbreak occurred north of it -- the most severe ones virtually on it), and the typical dry line seems to have been set up out to the west; so a convergence of boundaries was present to help concentrate the other factors. On a more "macro-meteorological" scale, a big upper level low was sitting over New Mexico, the jet stream was split pretty much north and south of the continental U.S., and a series of low level short wave troughs had been moving across the country for a number of days. Radar data for the tornado can be found in the Weather Bureau report, although I don't know how much help 1957 weather radar info might be in filling out the picture.

(2) Actually a thirty foot long cylinder of muslin run along slots cut in the top and bottom of the set, plus a lot of dust stirred up by fans.
 

Home