Damage
The tornado uprooted trees and destroyed temporary tents set up for the National Outdoor Retailers Association convention, claiming the life of one booth set-up supervisor, Allen Crandy, 38, of Las Vegas, Nevada. In The Avenues, over 120 homes were severely damaged and had roofs blown off and 34 homes were completely destroyed. Over 100 people were reported injured and a dozen critically.
The Delta Center (now the EnergySolutions Arena), home of the Utah Jazz of the National Basketball Association, suffered minor damage. All of the windows from the nearby Wyndham Hotel (now the Radisson Hotel), across the street from the temporary tents, were broken out, raining down shards of glass on people attempting to escape from the collapsed tents. Construction cranes for the LDS Conference Center were toppled by the storm, which nearly struck the city's landmark Mormon Temple. Damage to historic buildings in the lower Capitol Hill area of Salt Lake was reported. Nearly all of the trees in Memory Grove, a World War I memorial park at the mouth of City Creek Canyon near downtown, were reportedly torn out, as well as hundreds of old trees on the Capitol grounds. A tree used as a popular photo spot at the Salt Lake Temple, commonly after marriages, was also destroyed.
This was the first major tornado to occur in a major urban area's downtown district and strike buildings of nearly 500 ft (150 m) tall according to Bill Alder of the National Weather Service. Ironically, it happened in an area of the U.S. where tornados are quite rare. The governor of Utah in 1999, Michael O. Leavitt, heard the sound of the tornado moving between the tall glass buildings just before the windows imploded. The tornado caused approximately $170 million in damage.
Read more about this topic: 1999 Salt Lake City Tornado
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