APRIL 19TH 1996 | My First Tornado

Today is the 29th anniversary of the April 19th, 1996 tornado outbreak that stood for nearly three decades as the biggest single-day tornado outbreak in my home state of Illinois. 39 tornadoes touched down in Illinois that day, dethroned by the July 15th, 2024 derecho event that spawned 40-something tornadoes across northern and central Illinois. Those two events are completely different, and I still consider April 19th, 1996 to be the biggest synoptic / classic supercell driven tornado outbreak in Illinois history.

That's not to try to take anything away from some of these prolific tornado producing derechos - a 200+ mile wide storm system producing widespread 80-100 mph winds and routine tornadoes is nightmare fuel here in the Midwest - but there's also no comparing a day with 10-15 long-lived, cyclic supercells producing strong tornado after strong tornado after strong tornado as they marched across the state.

I was about to turn 9 years old and was already a tornado obsessed kid. My dad was a severe weather nut and a local storm spotter for a while, and we were close family friends with the local meteorologist who was also passionate about severe weather and tornadoes, specifically. I was doomed from the start, thanks to those two and then enabled by the rest of my family who supported my passionate obsession with tornadoes.

Severe weather outlook from the Storm Prediction Center - High Risk across Illinois and Indiana.

So it's a high risk day, tornadoes are in the forecast, and I ride my bike to the local school yard near my house. There was a big open field there that I'd sit in and look at the big open sky surrounding me. I watched my first towering cumulus fields become giant cumulonimbus clouds here, watched my first shelf clouds here, and generally got my first taste of sitting out in a field waiting on a storm, AKA storm chasing.

The storm that hit my hometown of Urbana didn't arrive until after dark. I'd returned home and was watching TV, bouncing between local coverage of the approaching tornado warned storms and my favorite show, the X-Files, which aired new episodes on Friday nights back then.

Through the evening, a long-lived tornadic supercell tracked right down Interstate 72 toward us in Champaign-Urbana. It started near Jacksonville (a town I now frequently stage in for storm chasing in central Illinois!) and produced tornadoes near Springfield, Decatur, and Monticello. As the storm drew closer and closer it looked like the tornadic portion would slip south of us in Champaign-Urbana. The supercell pulled a weird evolution though, and the southern circulation occluded and a new circulation developed further north and west - this circulation WOULD clip town. Before a warning was issued, Ed Kieser came over the airwaves on WILL and said a new circulation was evident on radar and that folks in Champaign-Urbana should head for their shelters.

I was herded down to the basement with my siblings while my dad did his Midwestern dad thing and hung out the back door. When he hollered out that he saw a funnel cloud, I sprinted up the stairs and joined him on the back porch as we watched a lightning illuminated cone funnel pass a little less than a mile to our southeast. Moments later, a flurry of emergency vehicles flew past our house in that direction making it clear something bad had happened. An F3 tornado had touched down in southern Urbana and damaged or destroyed several homes as it swept through neighborhoods and subdivisions around Philo Road.

As the supercell continued east, producing an even larger tornado that swallowed the entire town of Ogden, I looked out the same back porch door and watched the most electric thunderstorm I've ever seen with a constant strobe of flashes lighting up the sky. Clean-up took weeks as I reflected on the fact that one of the monsters I'd been obsessed with had visited me and left a scar in my town. To this day, I still think about that tornado as I drive across its path along Philo Road in southeast Urbana. I think about the car flipped in the middle of the road, powerlines draped across it, with pieces of homes scattered about.

I don't necessarily have a single tornado origin story, or single defining event that made me the way that I am today. It was more like a series of events, and this was a big one. The tornado-in-my-town experience is one that kicks off the journey to becoming a meteorologist or storm chaser for many, but the obsession with tornadoes was already there for me. This was one of them coming to visit me at 8 years old to say, yep, we're out here.

Here's an interesting thought - you know how some people describe big life events as being seared into their mind, like they can close their eyes and see it? A lot of moments from that night are like that ... but the tornado is NOT. I had no idea what I was looking at and I was so amped up that the entire thing is a blur. We'd always had a video camera growing up, but ours was broken that day. We've got video of every one of my birthdays and Christmas mornings growing up basically, but we didn't have video of this defining moment in my life? My first tornado?? THAT is the moment I want to rewatch over and over!! Our video should be on the next VHS Tornado video classic!

It drove me bonkers that we did not have video of this incredible moment... I'd waited all my short life to see a tornado like I'd seen on TV and at Ed Kieser's tornado shows and it finally happened and I had no video of it. Fast forward just four years and at age 13 I saved up money from my daily paper route and eventually went to Best Buy and bought my own Sony camcorder so that no storm like this would ever go undocumented by me. That's what began my obsession with documenting thunderstorms on video and splicing together little videos to show my family and friends on our TV.

Fast forward two decades and that's all this is, SKYDRAMA. It's still just me, racing out the door to where I'm pretty sure a storm or tornado is going to occur that I'm going to want to remember with my video camera.

Thank you so much for joining me!

Here's some video that isn't mine from that night and the days after. It's got some audio of the local emergency radio traffic as the tornado moved into town. It's really spooky to hear local roads and landmarks being referenced, and then officers being told to seek shelter as the tornado moved into town: