Well, today marks 30 years since the Hamden tornado. As it is the first weather event I can remember (I was five), and furthermore the event that marked me for lifelong weather weeniedom, I feel it's always worth revisiting. We all know what a classic setup that day was, so I'll set aside the synoptics and stick to my recollections and those of my neighbors. My family was returning to New Haven from Fishers Island that afternoon. My earliest impression from that day came during the ferry crossing to New London. The Sound was almost mirror smooth and took on a strange grey slate color, reflecting the bank of tenebrous cloud overhead (what I assume in retrospect to have been the anvil) and a darker louring horizon to the north west. The journey from New London to roughly Madison was evidently not worth committing to memory, but I remember traffic slowing in the vicinity of one of those I95 rest stops and my dad leaning forward over the wheel and peering up through the windshield and saying, "Man, what is going on?" That's when I began to take notice of how dark the sky was and the ragged whorl of cloud overhead. Directly to the north, it was just blue/black with frequent green CG. A few huge raindrops started ricocheting off the top of our Volvo 240DL wagon and mom put up the windows despite the stifling heat. Man, what a deluge. The cars around us vanished in a fog of water and flying leaves and brake lights. Wipers were useless. I don't remember any hail though. We crept along the highway and when we approached the Lake Saltonstall bridge, my mother made an exclamation, for there was an overhead sign down in the road and a large stand of pines that had been sheared off maybe 10 feet from the ground. I don't believe this was tornado-related, probably just impressive straight-line stuff, but it made an indelible impression. The stand has grown back quite a bit in the last 30 years, but you can still see where the blowdown was. Difficult as the driving on 95 was, the real challenge began when we got on I-91 and took our exit. There were trees and power lines down all over. We had to snake around all over to find an open route home. I don't know where it was (5 year olds are not known for their mastery of local geography), but there was at least one street we could not pass because a roof was across it. Incidentally, I thought that recollection was a figment of my imagination until last year, when my father actually brought it up. Finally we made it home. We were about 2 miles east of ground zero and had a few broken window panes on the northern exposure from large hail. My grandmother saved a few hail stones in her freezer after the storm and showed them to us the next day. We also had a large white pine down in the yard. That is where my direct recollection ends, but I'll tack on that when driving through East Rock Park for years afterwards, there were large chunks of roofing and insulation, some of which had come from the Albertus Magnus gymnasium, lodged high up in the trees.
Some other recollections from relatives/family friends:
My uncle (who incidentally was also caught in the May '18 tornado on Gaylord Mtn Rd) lived about a quarter mile from the tornado's worst destruction. He said one of the things that tipped him off that this was an unusual storm was that one could hear just constant thunder even when the storm was still really far off. He compared it to an artillery barrage. He said the air got incredibly still and the birds stopped singing, and the sky got darker and darker. He said that, although he and my aunt felt kind of silly, they just felt instinctively compelled to the basement. From a small window down there at ground level he could see out to the street and he said he'll never forget the way the air became foggy and moved sideways at terrific speed with trash cans and branches nearly airborne in it. Their house suffered minor damage in lost siding, gutters and shingles, as well as a few lost trees.
I was part of a play group with other coevals that rotated from house to house. One of the houses was owned by a woman who grew up in rural Illinois. She said later she instantly knew a tornado was coming when things got still and the sky turned a distinct blue-green. She grabbed her son and went straight to the basement. She said she could hear the tornado's roar, but thankfully their house was spared any significant damage. Her son, however, was deeply scarred by the experience and for a decade afterward ran to the basement any time there was thunder.
Finally, my godmother lived on top of a hill on Giles Street, very close to the worst damage. There were a number of destroyed houses a block or two from her place. She was not home when the tornado hit, but her garage was blown in and several trees came down on her roof. Most impressively, there was a large oak tree just up the way from her that had a slate shingle buried in its trunk a good three or four inches by the tornado. Sadly the tree is no longer there (I went looking a few years ago), but for many years that shingle was still there, with the tree growing a burl around it.
Anyway, that about sums it up for me. I've also attached some of the local coverage from the storm, which contains the only radar images I've ever been able to find from it.
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