Tornado Activity Begins
At 8:10PM, an off-duty Lubbock police officer spotted a funnel cloud on the east side of the city, and grapefruit-size hail was reported. At 8:15, local radar indicated a hook echo and a tornado warning was issued for Lubbock and Crosby counties, and the first tornado to strike the city touched down seven miles south of Lubbock Municipal Airport, near the intersection of Quirt Avenue and Broadway. Since it was in a relatively sparsely populated area of the city, this first tornado caused little significant damage; however, reports of damaging hail continued to come in from around the city. At 9:15, tornado sirens in Idalou were sounded, and by 9:30 baseball-sized hail was falling in the northeastern sector of Lubbock.
At about 9:35PM, a second and much more significant tornado touched down near the campus of Texas Tech University, and began to track northeast, carving a path of destruction that at its peak reached almost two miles in width right through the heart of the city. The devastating twister tore through several densely populated residential areas before slicing through downtown, dealing a direct blow to the First National Bank building and the Great Plains Life building. The tornado then moved north toward the airport, where at 10:00PM, anemometers were already reading winds of 77 knots (approximately 90 miles per hour (140 km/h). At 9:46, power failed at the Lubbock Civil Defense headquarters, and three minutes later, the local weather bureau lost power and its personnel took shelter from the tornado, which was now bearing down on the area and passed over the Weather Bureau building at 10:03PM.
The tornado continued north-northeast toward the communities of Abernathy and New Deal, where local authorities had begun sounding tornado sirens due to alerts passed along to them via two-way radio by the officials at the crippled Lubbock Weather Bureau office. The tornado finally dissipated at about 10:10PM near the community of Petersburg.
Read more about this topic: 1970 Lubbock Tornado
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