One of Iowa’s worst tornado outbreaks remembered

By Lauren Squires, Loras College

Brian Ross talks about the Charles City tornado.

People change, but Mother Nature doesn’t change, Cary J. Hahn, moderator of the Iowa Tornados 40 th Anniversary session said at the Iowa Broadcast News Association’s 2008 convention.

Grant Price, former KWWL and WMT news director, Dean Borg, WSUI Radio and Brian Ross, ABC News Investigative reporter, discussed the tornado of 1968.

It was May 15th, 1968 when two F-5 tornadoes hit the towns of Charles City, Fayette, Oelwein and Maynard killing 18 and injuring many more.

Seem like it just happened
Ross, who worked for KWWL-TV at the time, said he recalled that day as if it were yesterday. He said he was trying to catch the tornado on film. After arriving in Charles City he got a report from the sheriff saying the tornado was headed their way.

“I think I was the last one who did not go undercover. I had a camera and a tape recorder. I put the recorder outside and of course afterwards, I never saw that tape,” Ross said as the audience laughed. His recorder was swept up by the tornado as it tore through Charles City that afternoon.

Price and Borg reminded the audience that sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to end up covering until you arrive on the scene.

“I had no idea on my way there that’d I’d be there for a week,” Borg said. “I was giving reports back to radio. I remember mentioning the fact that I’m driving by people taking cover in the ditches,” he said. He was working in the newsroom at WMT when news spread of the tornado.

Price added, “Keep in mind folks, cell phones, no one had ever heard of. We’re in Cedar Rapids, it was 100 miles to Charles City.”

Communications have changed
Forty years later many people are wondering how journalists were able to cover such massive destruction, with so little technology, Price said. “It seems to me that one of the reasons that I think these stations were able to do a professional job was because of competent journalists. We used the tools we had to put together great stories,” he said.

For those who weren’t around to experience the Tornados of ’68, Ross seemed to put it in perspective saying, “When I think back about it. The feeling there [on May 15 th] was what I saw in New York on September 11 th.”