Worcester Tornado 70th Anniversary Special Edition
Reprinted from the May 2023 issue of Happiness Pony
U.S. Weather Bureau forecast, June 9, 1953, 11:30 a.m.—“Windy, partly cloudy, hot and humid, with thunderstorms, some locally severe, developing this afternoon.”
“An Ice Cream Cone in the Sky”
On June 9, 1953, when the deadliest recorded tornado to ever hit New England struck Worcester, tornado tracking and warning systems were still in their infancy. It was only the fourth tornado to ever be seen on radar. There was a fledgling system for public tornado warnings; it had been triggered the previous day, when the same storm system hit Ohio and Michigan, killing 125 people. However, as the storm approached Massachusetts, forecasters feared a tornado warning would be “unnecessarily alarming.” Instead, the U.S. Weather Bureau issued its first ever severe thunderstorm warning for New England. When hail began falling in the city, residents did not understand it portended an approaching tornado.
There were no official warnings for the tornado. Many people did not see it coming or recognize what it was. If a person happened to glimpse it from two miles away, they had four minutes to take cover. One man in the Curtis Apartments, “saw the funnel in the distance, recognized it, ran up and down the halls of his wing warning the other residents, and succeeded in getting most or all of the families down into the cellar before impact.” The apartments located in Great Brook Valley were some of the hardest hit.
Not everyone in Worcester had such a neighbor. Sixty-six people were killed (dozens more in nearby towns) and 327 sustained major injuries. The winds, which reached 355 MPH, decimated entire blocks and blew debris as far as Cape Cod. The blueprints for the Curtis Apartments were found 75 miles away, in Duxbury. And yet, the tornado did not have a long-term effect on city infrastructure. Immediate aid and long-term recovery resources were abundant. The Worcester Housing Authority projects, which housed a majority of those made homeless by the storm, had buildings rebuilt and people rehoused by November. The few permanent changes are not easily noticeable today, unless you know where to look. Assumption College moved its campus from the Greendale area to Salisbury Street. Brookside Home Farm, the city’s homeless shelter, was decimated by the tornado; it permanently closed a few years later. (Jen Burt)
“New England. The Man” vs. Nature
Several films have captured the phenomenon of “New England. The Man” vs. Nature, such as The Perfect Storm (2000) featuring swordfishermen from Gloucester facing a mile-high wave, This Old House: How to Clear Poison Ivy (2014) where Roger walks through a proper suit-up for eradicating some heinous flora, and Baby Whale! (2015) where Mikey and Jay from Malden witness something they ain’t never seen before. One encapsulation of this region-specific conflict type is a video that’s about to celebrate its 12th anniversary this June titled Tornado in Brimfield MA. It stars Chris and Scott, two employees of an auto salvage yard that was utterly demolished by a tornado. The single line description “We survived under the stairs” gives all the context necessary as they take you through the “aftermath rain” to survey the wreckage. The actual main character, as in all these films, is the animated non-rhotic Boston accent, dropping “r”s like J-hooks in the middle of the street. “New England. The Man” is an archetype that freely mixes hyperbole and earnestness and brings a certain cheekiness to processing trauma, as exemplified in the instance where our narrator pauses while enumerating the destruction to give an aside: “Hey, that Nissan will still drive!” (Anthony Richards)
A Phantasy of Worcester in Ruins
In 1956, Anthony Wallace created psychological models of response that he posited could be applied across disasters: disaster syndrome and counter-disaster syndrome. For his research, he came to Worcester, analyzing 50 case histories of those impacted by the 1953 tornado. Tornado in Worcester: An Exploratory Study of Individual and Community Behavior in an Extreme Situation was the third in a series published by the Committee on Disaster Studies under the National Academy of Sciences. The paper outlines what Wallace observed as two major responses:
The disaster syndrome affects those in the immediate disaster zone in three stages. An initial response sees people acting dazed, passive, or aimless. Wallace points out this defensive response is not caused by physical shock but affects people regardless of injury. Worcester subjects demonstrated this response when they recounted “the sight of a virtually destroyed community. Again and again in the interviews the phrase ‘the end of the world’ occurs to describe the phantasy of survivors; the sight of block after block of ruined homes, of maimed and bleeding people, fallen trees, scarred and lifeless lawns, bedraggled wires, and everything covered with mud, aroused momentarily in many the thought that this was the earth’s last hour, or that an atomic bomb had fallen, or that the whole city of Worcester was in ruins.”
Survivors then move to a second stage of “extreme suggestibility,” willing to act when given direction. Wallace shares this anecdote from a firefighter: “That thousand feet of hose went down that street just about as fast as you could let it run; and there was a couple that hollered, ‘Come on, give us a hand with the line.’ And just as fast as one man could pull it out of the wagon, it was goin’ away from us. It was amazing. In fact, I’ve never seen a hose line move quite as fast as that one did. The people around there were very cooperative in that case, very cooperative.”
Altruism defines the third stage, paired with “a mildly euphoric identification with the damaged community.” Think the days after the Boston Marathon bombing or after 9/11. People regain agency lacking in previous stages and try to put it to good use before it fades with the return to normalcy, or as Wallace dubs it, “a steady state.”
Conversely, the counter-disaster syndrome is characterized by individuals being hyperactive, overly conscientious and “less rational than normal.” This syndrome affects those who are outside the direct impact area: rescuers, helpers, and those connected to the victims. Their behavior is characterized by anxiety and selflessness which leads to mistakes. For example, medical professionals sutured wounds contaminated with debris following the tornado, a mistake they likely would not have made in a less extreme situation.
I was initially drawn to Wallace’s efforts to provide an orderly understanding of disaster as part of my own search to understand people’s responses to COVID, yet in scale and scope they are hard to compare. Reading this study offered me insights into the Worcester of the past more than lessons that apply to my community today. As our own disaster lingers and the attempt to restore the steady state eludes us, don’t despair. We may find it yet. (JB)
Interpretations of Sight of Funnel
from Anthony Wallace’s Tornado in Worcester
Recognized it as tornado: 14
Did not know what it was: 5
Considered the possibility of it being a tornado, but dismissed the thought: 2
Thought it was smoke from a fire set by lightning in thunderstorm: 1
Didn’t see it approaching: 28
New England. The Man—1953
an excerpt from a case history by Anthony Wallace
Q. You say you didn’t feel scared really until…
A. I think, you know, after the truck came back up, and still kept swinging and heaving in the wind, and trembling—I kept, I’d look up through the windshield and think I shouldn’t have got this truck (laughing) I should have kept the old Dodge I had. The windshield was too wide on there (laughing) and it looked terribly big to me with the stuff that was in the air—shingles, roofs, and stuff, like that swingin’ by there, that is, you could see something come by you, you couldn’t actually identify it.
Q. Did you notice any feelings inside yourself at any time during this?
A. No, (loudly and slowly) I don’t think that I noticed any feelings, although people came in afterwards said they thought (chuckling) I must have been stunned a little bit.
