When the first settlers arrived in the 1600s, among the things they were unprepared for in Connecticut was the weather. Owing to its geographical location, the new land they were seeking to inhabit produced an ever-changing array of meteorological varieties and extremes they could not have imagined. Sure, they had experienced cold and snow in Europe, but not this cold and snow. The same could be said for thunderstorms, hurricanes, winds, unrelenting rains, summer hail and waves of scorching heat. And then there were the tornadoes.
The tornado was so new to the settlers that they didn't have a name for it. Instead, they described the terrifying funnels as hurricanes, windstorms, cyclones, typhoons, whirlwinds and tempests. Still, by any other name, the tornado was not diminished.
Although there may have been confusion over what to call tornadoes, the Connecticut Courant, after its launch in 1764, often provided detailed accounts of these furies.
Wait Robbins was away from his Wethersfield farm on Aug. 15, 1787. Along with two of his sons he was on his way to New Hampshire to enroll one of his boys at Dartmouth. Not that it would have mattered much if he had been at home when at about 3 p.m there appeared:
"A black column from earth to the cloud, of about 30-rods diameter, so thick that the eye could not pervade it, whirled with amazing velocity and a most tremendous roar — it appeared luminous and ignited and was charged with broken pieces of fences, and huge limbs of trees, which were continually crashing against each other in the air or tumbling to the ground."
At first, those remaining behind at the Robbins' farm — his wife, four other children plus a 5-month-old, an elderly servant, and a hired laborer — were not overly concerned about the approaching storm. That changed when they saw one of the horses picked up and tossed a significant distance.
Courant correspondent J. Lewis continues his account of what happened next:
"Mrs. Robbins with her babe in her arms, and two little boys and the labourer fled to the distance of about 35 yards, where the labourer passed her a few paces and was overtaken by the hurricane, thrown over a fence into a garden and escaped with little hurt. Near the place where the labourer passed them the two little boys were found, amidst the rubbish of the demolished buildings — the oldest, about 10 years of age lifeless — the other it is feared mortally wounded — Mrs. Robbins with her babe still in her arms is supposed to be hurled by the violence of the hurricane twenty yards back toward the house for there she was found dead, with her babe lying a few paces distant, wounded but not badly — The servant with the other two children fled a different course; they were all wounded but likely to recover."
The Robbins' house, barn, several outbuildings and an orchard were destroyed. Debris vacuumed up by the tornado was scattered far and wide. Two silk dresses belonging to Mrs. Robbins were carried across the Connecticut River and dropped three miles away — on the doorstep of a home in Glastonbury, her brother's.
"The philosopher will undoubtedly take notice that this hurricane is of a sort somewhat singular, partaking in part of the nature of the typhoon and the preller, but of neither wholly, not of a uniform mixture of both. The man of seriousness will consider that the voice of such providences is the voice of God, awfully denouncing his anger, and calling to consideration.
"I am, Gentleman with respect, your humble Servant, J. Lewis."
Over the next 100 years or so, tornadoes regularly appeared without warning, cutting narrow paths of devastation. As is still the case today, most Connecticut tornadoes occurred within the geographical boundaries we know as Hartford and Litchfield counties. Judging from reports, the majority of tornadoes were at the less severe end of the scale, probably containing wind speeds in the 73 to 112 mph range.
It is impossible to determine how many tornadoes raked Connecticut during our early history because record keeping was nonexistent and identifying storms as such was subjective. But it is probable the modern average of one or two a year is close.
Also, there are many instances in which conditions produced more than one tornado on a given day. The 1787 tornado chronicled above was one of four that hit the state on that date.
Tornado records improved with the creation of the U.S. Weather Bureau in 1870, although forecasters possessed little in the way of storm identification and tracking technology
Interestingly, the word tornado was not officially used until 1950 because the weather service feared using the term in forecasts would cause the public to panic. Even after the Weather Bureau relented, the Federal Communications Commission forbid its usage for the same reason until 1954.
In the early evening hours of Aug. 9, 1878, a violent tornado touched down in unsuspecting Wallingford and in a matter of minutes 34 were dead, scores were injured, and the town was reduced to rubble.
A story in the New York Times described the advancing storm.
"Under threatening clouds that had spread over the village like a black curtain other blacker clouds were driven. They came up from the west almost with the swiftness of thought. Before a dense black mass that rolled overt the Wallingford community, a fleecy, misty curtain advanced, hiding the orchards and vineyards as it advanced forward. The lightning flashed in blinding forks from this cloud that was more like smoke than vapor in its lightness."
The carnage was as compact as the storm, most of it occurring within the confines of a path 60 yards wide and a half-mile long. Winds speeds were estimated at 207 to 260 mph, making it an F-4 by modern standards.
Searchers found Matthew Mooney's body 415 feet away from his shattered house, where the other six members of his family also lay dead.
They found a lifeless woman in the middle of the street, holding the still form of a baby to her breast.
They also found flocks of featherless chicken carcasses, people hanging from tree branches 20 feet up, and personal accounts almost beyond belief.
A man fishing at a lake was sucked up along with a volume of water and carried 300 feet. He claimed to have almost drowned during his flight.
A church sexton digging a grave was stripped of his clothes by the wind and tossed into the open hole.
A woman sent flying through the air later said: ``I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The pigs were whirling around me and the cows were flying as if they had wings.''
The Wallingford tornado remains the second deadliest to strike New England, surpassed in tragedy only by the Worcester tornado of June 1953. That one killed 94, injured 1,306, destroyed 561 homes, and damaged 1,994. It is the only F-5 tornado (winds between 261 and 318 mph) ever known to have occurred in this part of the country.
On May 24, 1962, an F3 tornado, which produced F4-level damage in some places, tore through Waterbury and the Waterville-Fairmount section of the city. The sky surrounding the dark funnel was a weird shade of green in which shards of debris floated. As it got closer, a loud roaring sound, similar to a train only much more terrifying, was heard. I know this description to be accurate, because it is what I saw.
The tornado leveled four homes and heavily damaged 18 others in the neighborhood next to my own. I remember seeing survivors, dazed, confused and bleeding afterward. I remember a three-story dwelling that had an entire side torn off and that looked like a doll house.
Although damage from the storm along its three-town, 11-mile route included 200 buildings destroyed and 600 damaged, only one person was killed.
Debris from the storm was spread over 100 miles. Three men in Hartford's Colt Park saw a pair of pants drop from the sky. And in Glocester, R.I. a woman found a report card from Sprague School, my grammar school, in her garden. (Thank God, it wasn't one of mine.)
Two of the 35 tornadoes in Connecticut over the past 34 years have been F-4s: the Windsor Locks tornado in 1979 and the tornado that hit Hamden in 1989.
Although most tornadoes occur during June, July and August in Connecticut, the Windsor Locks tornado struck on Oct. 3, 1979. It set down at about 3 p.m., and quickly carved a corridor of death and destruction a quarter-mile wide and four miles long. Hardest hit was the Poquonock section near Bradley International Airport. Three people were killed and more than 300 injured.
William Kowalsky was killed by flying debris as he sat in a truck cab with two others.
Dennis Rice was trying to run to the rear of his hardware store when, "The wind shot me down the aisle — shot me like a bullet.'"
An unidentified man driving his car near the heavily damaged New England Air Museum called his insurance company after the storm and reported that his car had been rear-ended — by a fighter plane.
The Hamden tornado of July 10, 1989, was the strongest of three tornadoes that formed in the northwest hills that day and went on a 60-minute, 70-mile tear before leaving the state.
Along the way, the storms ravaged a stand of trees known as the Cathedral Pines in Cornwall and then did similar clear-cutting at the Mohawk Mountain ski area. In the towns of Cornwall and Litchfield, 6.5-million board feet of timber was toppled.
In Bantam, several historic buildings were destroyed, and in Watertown, a 12-year-old girl was killed and her sister paralyzed when a tree fell on their tent at Black Rock State Park.
In Waterbury, a man died of cardiac arrest shortly after the storm passed.
The strongest of the tornadoes swept through Hamden with wind speeds reaching 260 mph. About 400 structures were destroyed, 40 people were injured, and damage was put at $100 million.
If there is a common thread twisting through the tornadoes that have torn through Connecticut, it is their arbitrariness: Why does the tornado choose one side of the street, not the other; one house, not another; one life, not another's? Is it fate, luck, God? These are the questions we ask today after a tornado has visited, and they are the same questions our ancestors puzzled over three centuries ago.
In his story on the tornado that struck Wait Robbins' farm in 1787, Courant correspondent J. Lewis opined:
"Too much gratitude can not be expressed by the inhabitants to that Being who has his way in the whirlwind and the storm that it passed in a line where the least possible damage should be sustained."
Editor's Note: These accounts were distilled from news reports of the time including stories in The Courant, New York Times and other state newspapers, weather articles, Internet research and previous articles written by Shea.