The Night the Tornado Took a Quarter of Lubbock
Near Lubbock, Texas
The afternoon of May eleventh, nineteen seventy was sunny and warm in Lubbock, the temperature above ninety degrees. By six-thirty that evening, storms were building to the south. The Lubbock office of the National Weather Service was located at the city's municipal airport, and it would be among the buildings damaged before the night was over.
At nine thirty-five in the evening, a multiple-vortex tornado touched down in southwestern Lubbock. Over the next thirty minutes it carved an eight-and-a-half-mile path through roughly a quarter of the city. The storm was later rated F five on the Fujita scale, as of this writing, it remains the westernmost F-five tornado ever recorded in the United States.
Twenty-six people died. More than fifteen hundred were injured. Nearly nine thousand homes were damaged or destroyed. The tornado struck the Guadalupe barrio north of Fourth Street particularly hard, a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood where homes were completely leveled in some blocks. Residents who survived there were displaced across the city, with many eventually resettled in the southern and western portions of Lubbock.
Downtown was not spared. The twenty-story Great Plains Life Building, now the NTS Tower, the tallest structure in the city, was struck by the tornado's edge and survived, even though the funnel's most violent core passed about half a mile away. It is believed to be among the tallest buildings ever left standing after being struck by a violent tornado. The damage to downtown's northwestern section was so severe that the cleared ground was later used to build the Lubbock Memorial Civic Center.
Fujita himself spent weeks mapping the tornado's path in what researchers later described as the most detailed single-tornado survey ever conducted to that point. The data he gathered here contributed directly to the development of the Fujita scale of tornado intensity, adopted the following year.
The tornado also destroyed the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal building. Radio broadcasters Bud Andrews and Ernesto Barton, who covered the disaster through the night, later received Presidential Citations from Richard Nixon for their service.
