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'The Lost Tapes: Super Tornado Outbreak' on Smithsonian Reminds Us of the Power of Weather

December 9, 2018 | By David Hinckley


Let’s face it, all of us can use a good extreme weather show once in a while.

And if you air it under the aegis of the Smithsonian Channel, it almost sounds, well, educational.

So put aside any reservations about watching a TV show for an adrenalin rush, and dial up The Lost Tapes: Super Tornado Outbreak at 9 p.m. ET Sunday.

As extreme weather shows go, this is industrial grade. The footage of the massive tornadoes that ripped through the heart of the country on April 3, 1974, is stunning and sobering. Even without the deafening winds that accompany tornadoes in real life, it’s clear how terrifying it could be to find yourself anywhere near one of these puppies.

With winds up to 300 miles an hour, moving forward at speeds of 50 or 60 miles an hour, they can be on you before you know it, shattering everything in their path.


One man interviewed in a hospital bed recalls how they heard the tornado warning and didn’t have time to get from their upstairs bedroom to the basement before it was shredding their house.

Like other shows in the Smithsonian Lost Tapes series, which wraps up its current season with this episode, Super Tornado Outbreak relies on vintage film and stills. In this case, that mostly means local TV coverage of the disaster, from stations in Alabama up through Indiana.

It’s a mild distraction to see the clothing and hairstyles of news anchors in 1974, just as the street scenes remind us what big old American cars used to look like.

This is a show driven by its villains, though, and those are the funnel clouds that materialize out of ominous dark masses in the sky.

The show explains that a perfect storm of atmospheric conditions caused tornadoes to explode from Alabama clear up to Michigan, riding a warm air mass from the south that crashed into a turbulent cold air front in the north.

Two or three tornadoes can be a deadly outbreak. In this case, 148 tornadoes broke out over 20 hours, some of them churning through areas that had already been devastated hours earlier. More than a dozen were category F5, the deadliest, packing winds of more than 250 mph.

They pass through an area in minutes, leaving long swaths looking like Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. Everything is leveled. Cars are thrown upside down against buildings. Railroad cars are toppled. Buildings are piles of brick, stone, and wood.

More than 300 people were killed, including two dozen in the tiny town of Brandenburg, Ky. The numbers and the extent of the decimation are close to numbing.

'The Lost Tapes: Super Tornado Outbreak' on Smithsonian Reminds Us of the Power of Weather