This Date in Weather History

The state of Maine is known for many things, including my favorite, Maine lobsters. But one of the longest running industries in North America, dating back until the early 1600s is logging. The British Royal Navy quickly claimed the best stands of light and strong Eastern White Pine for the masts, spars, and planking for their fast and maneuverable ships. England's competitors, the French, the Dutch, and the Spanish, were left to build from the heavier Baltic Fir. It was Revolutionary War debt which boosted the first large scale harvests. To raise money, Massachusetts sold land to the District of Maine. Logging operations grew in proportion to the national demand for lumber products, which grew in proportion to the expansion of the nation itself over the 19th and well into the 20th centuries. The industry became extensive and complex employing surveyors to identify likely stands of trees, lumbermen to cut timber, teamsters and their draft animals to haul logs, scalers to measure the timber's worth, and river drivers to float logs to the mills. Most trees were felled in the late fall and winter and then floated downstream on Maine’s rivers to ports at the coast. These golden rivers, as they were called, because of their color appearance because of the logs and the money the wood would represent on delivery were covered from bank to bank with floating timber. Most of the time they were controlled by crews working the river. But as they floated downstream in the spring they would sometimes get loose and out of control. The result could be, and often times was disaster as the timber acted like a battering ram destroying anything in its path. On May 17, 1814 after a soggy April and early May the rivers were all swollen and the logs did their work wiping out anything in their path, destroying bridges and docks and any structures near the shore. It would take years to recover.

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In 1865, a group of mill owners from the Northampton area of Massachusetts constructed a dam on the Mill River north of the town of Williamsburg, it was constructed by using a design drawn by one of the owners, a man with no training in engineering. The dam was poorly constructed and leaked as soon as it was filled, still it was in place for 9 years. But on May 16, 1874 after several days of heavy rain, the dam completely failed. Almost all off of the water held behind the earthen dam burst out like a wall of water. 139 people died in the towns downstream to the south.  The flood destroyed much of the villages of Williamsburg, Skinnerville and Northampton itself. Even though so many died, the death toll might had been much higher, but the dam keeper George Cheney, rode his horse at a gallop to Williamsburg to raise the alarm as the dam began to fail. Other riders took off from Williamsburg and were able to warn residents in towns to the south. Despite an inquest and the negligence of the mill owners, no one was punished for the disaster.  Even today, people still visit the site of the tragedy by hiking on a public trail to the former site of the Williamsburg Reservoir.

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During the late afternoon and early evening of May 15, 1968, five tornadoes, two F1s, one F2, and two F5s occurred in Iowa. These tornadoes were part of the May 15-16, 1968 outbreak with a total of 39 tornadoes which affected ten states; Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, and Tennessee. The tornadoes in Iowa caused 18 fatalities and 619 injuries of which 450 occurred in Charles City alone. The huge tornado, approximately a half mile wide passed directly through Charles City from south to north. The tornado destroyed, 372 homes and 58 businesses, 188 homes and 90 businesses sustained major damage, and 356 homes and 46 businesses sustained minor damage. Eight churches, 3 schools were damaged or destroyed, the police station was heavily damaged, and 1,250 vehicles were destroyed. About 60 percent of the city was damaged by the tornado. The, Iowa Governor requested federal assistance to repair damage to public facilities resulting from the and on May 29, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared the state of Iowa as a disaster area.

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Late season snowstorms, like those in the autumn can cause havoc in a different way than those in the middle of winter. Many trees in both seasons are in full or partial leaf, as are bushes and other shrubby. In the middle of winter, snow’s greatest impact is on the inability to travel due to impassible roads or severe drifting that blocks doorways and even makes walking difficult. In the fall and spring, because of more sunlight it is hard for the snow to accumulate on the warmer streets and sidewalks so that usually isn’t much of a problem. The bigger issue is falling tree limbs caused by the weight of the snow on those limbs as the snow plasters itself on all those leaves. In modern times those limbs not only are hazardous to those that might be walking underneath them but they also take down powerlines. It is a rare storm in the late spring that combines both. This usually happens when the snow falls so hard and fast it piles up on everything. One such a storm happened on May 14, 1834. A Northeast coastal storm spread snow from Ohio to New England. 6" fell at Erie, 10" at Bradford, 4" at Rochester, 12" at Burlington, VT. Marshfield, in Washington County northeast of Montpelier, picked up more than 2 feet and Haverhill, NH had 36" 

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Hailstorms are notorious for inflicting costly damage upon property and crops every year in the United States. Annually, the destruction from these frozen rain pellets that travel dozens of miles per hour through the atmosphere results in $1 billion in damage, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration – NOAA. Hail also poses a safety threat to both humans and animals. NOAA estimates that 24 people in the U.S. are injured each year, with some injuries significant enough to land them in the hospital. In May , 1995, severe storms brewing over the Dallas-Fort Worth metro-plex in Texas produced damaging winds, heavy rain and extremely large hail. The storms, which remain some of the costliest in history, also impacted an outdoor festival called Mayfest, where over 10,000 people were caught out in the open with little to no shelter from the hail. More than 400 people were hurt after being pelted with hail up to the size of a softball. Although no one was killed, about 60 people were seriously injured. “What injuries we do see are to people who are out in the open, like farmers, golfers, landscapers – anyone that’s doing outside work that doesn’t have any means to find shelter right away in a storm,” said AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Dan Kottlowski. However, how likely is it that a hailstorm can actually kill you? The odds are low, but it can happen, experts say. The World Meteorological Organization reported that the highest mortality associated with a hailstorm happened in India, on April 30, 1888. The deadly storm killed 246 people with pieces of hail as large as “goose eggs, oranges and cricket balls.” In the U.S., hailstorms resulting in loss of human life are quite rare. “Hail has to be really large to cause serious injury to people, or even death,” Kottlowski said. But on May 13, 1930 one of the few deaths by hail in the US. 36 miles NW of Lubbock, TX a farmer was caught in an open field and he died from his hail caused injuries.

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Newspapers and radio stations East of the Mississippi on the morning of May 12, 1934 carried ominous messages and headlines of a thickening black cloud of chocking dust and dirt moving out of the Great Plains states. The cloud would envelope the Mid-west and then Eastern states on May 12, turning mid-day sunlight into an eerie darkness, that seemed like night in many major cities. What happened? Actually, the causes can be traced back decades. Favorable weather conditions in the from 1900 to the 1920s with significant rainfall and relatively moderate winters, encouraged increased population and farming in the Great Plains. But the region entered an unusually dry period in the summer of 1930.  During the next decade, the Northern Plains suffered four of their driest years in almost 100 years. When this severe drought hit the Great Plains region in the 1930s, it resulted in erosion and loss of topsoil because of farming practices at the time. The drought dried the topsoil and over time it became reduced to a powdery consistency. Native high grasses that held the soil in place had been plowed under to make room for expanding crop lands, so when high winds that occur on the plains picked up the topsoil massive dust clouds and dust storms occurred, giving rise to the term Dust Bowl. The continuous dry weather caused crops to fail, leaving the plowed fields exposed to wind erosion. The fine soil of the Great Plains was easily picked up and carried east by strong winds. In November 1933, a very strong dust storm stripped topsoil from South Dakota farmlands in just one of a series of severe dust storms that year. But beginning on May 9, 1934, a strong, several days dust storm removed massive amounts of Great Plans soil in one perhaps the worst storm of the Dust Bowl.  The dust clouds first blew all the way to Chicago, where they deposited 12 million pounds of dust. By May 12, 1934, the same storm reached cities to the east, such as Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, New York City and Washington, D. C. turning day to night and chocking millions of people as dirt all the way from the plains states was deposited more than 1000 miles away on the streets and in the homes of major cities.

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The first week of May in 2003 had one of the worst tornado outbreaks on record in the United States reports indicate that 384 tornadoes occurred in 25 states, causing 42 deaths with at least 23 tornadoes on each day. Hardest hit were Missouri, where tornadoes occurred on 6 of the 7 days and 19 died; and Tennessee, where tornadoes occurred on 5 days and 11 died during the week-long outbreak that ended on May 11, 2003. The outbreak was so important that an entire paper was published on it in the American Meteorological Society magazine. There were also an incredible 723 wind reports and 1,782 hail reports that week! Oklahoma City suffered multiple twisters... from the National Weather Service report: "One day after and F4 tornado struct the southern Oklahoma City metropolitan area on May 8, 2003, a single supercell thunderstorm produced ten tornadoes in central Oklahoma, including one F3 and three F1 tornadoes in the northern Oklahoma City metropolitan area." A total of six F4 tornadoes struck during the week, including one around Kansas City and another near Memphis.

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May of 1889 was particularly warm and humid across the eastern United States. The jet-stream that steers weather system had lifted far north into Canada and air from the steam Gulf of Mexico has surged northward into the void. By May 9th chilly weather has re-established itself across the mid-west and was heading eastward as the jet stream dipped southward to push the chilly weather along. As the cold front marking the leading edge of the change moved into the east on the afternoon of May10, 1889 a rash of violent thunderstorms erupted and brought extensive damage to a corridor in Pennsylvania through Williamsport, Shamokin, Pottsville, Reading, Pottstown, Philadelphia and to Atlantic City, New Jersey. A tornado cut a large swath through Berks County, including the city of Reading, which was the second twister to cut through the city that year. The damage was very extensive and at least of par with that of major midwestern tornadoes. Dozens narrowly escaped death. Visibility lowered to less than 10 feet at times in blinding, wind-driven rain. Temperatures reached the mid to upper 90's before the storm hit.

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One of the most powerful May snowstorms to strike the Northeast hit on May 9, 1977. 13" fell at Gardiner, MA; 12.7" at Worchester, MA; 1/2 million people lost power. Officially 1/2" in Boston, but thunderstorms with snow in the suburbs dumped 10" in the Wellesley area. A foot of snow fell at Foster, RI. Bare grass did not reappear in Wellesley, MA until the afternoon of the 11th and it was the heaviest snow of the entire winter there...all the plows were activated although in many cases the plows had already been removed for the season from the trucks...schools were closed in the western suburbs of Boston, it was the latest school "snow day" ever...because of the convective nature of the storm, like hit and miss thunderstorms in the summer, some weird local variations occurred...with one town getting almost a foot of snow while just 5 miles away only a couple of inches fell. Vivid lightning accompanied the snowfall in many communities. Slide Mountain, NY had 27". Heavy snow also covered parts of New York. Cooperstown picked up 12.7" and in Connecticut 20" fell at Norfolk.

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The Hundred Years War between England and France began in 1337; by 1359, King Edward III of England led a huge army across the English Channel to France. The French did not engage in any pitched battles and mainly stayed behind protective walls of towns and cities. Meanwhile Edward conquered the countryside. In April 1360, Edward’s forces reached the Paris suburbs and began to move toward Chartres and its famous cathedral. While they were camped outside the town, now a suburb of Paris, in early May, a sudden storm hit. Lightning struck, killing a number of people, then large hailstones began falling hitting the soldiers. Two of the English generals were killed and panic set in among the troops, who had no shelter from the storm. Heavy losses were suffered by the English with more than 1000 estimated dead in the stampede caused by the storm. Some said it was a sign from God. King Edward of England was convinced to negotiate peace with the French. On May 8, 1360, a treaty was signed, marking the end of the first phase of the Hundred Years’ War. Edward agreed to renounce all claims to the throne of France. The hail storm and thunderstorms that produced the treaty were a direct line in the signing of the treaty.

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