The 1953 Worcester Tornado - 84 Minutes of Death

The last tornado in the United States to kill as may as ninety people, the Worcester Tornado of 1953 had winds estimated at over 317 miles per hour. The Worcester Tornado touched down in central Massachusetts in the late afternoon of June 9th, 1953, and for the next 84 minutes it obliterated everything in its path. The damage the Worcester Tornado caused was so severe that many residents, at the height of the Cold War, thought that the Russians had dropped an atomic bomb. Congress would actually debate in the weeks after the Worcester Tornado if the atomic bomb testing that had been occurring in the upper atmosphere was responsible for this and other related monster twisters that ravaged the States during 1953.

The same storm system that spawned the Worcester Tornado also had created one a day earlier in Flint, Michigan. The Flint Tornado had been an F-5 on the Fujita scale, meaning it was the absolute worst of cyclones. It had killed 116 people before dissipating, making it the ninth deadliest tornado to hit in the United States. The tracking by radar of such storms back in 1953 was not possible since the instrumentation was so crude, and on that fateful day in Massachusetts the Boston Weather Bureau had predicted thunderstorms, stopping short of warning against potential tornadoes to avoid panicking the people, who were hearing the news of the Flint destruction. Before the day was done, the strongest tornado ever to hit New England would etch itself into the memories of all those that felt its power for the rest of their lives.