19701776 Club
A mile-and-a-half-wide tornado tears through Lubbock; 26 are dead and a quarter of the city in ruins
Touching down at 19th and University at 9:35 p.m., the twister spends thirty minutes cutting an 8.5-mile path, shattering 80% of downtown's plate glass and damaging 8,800 homes.
Shortly after 9:35 p.m. on May 11, 1970, a multiple-vortex tornado touched down near the intersection of 19th Street and University Avenue in Lubbock, Texas, and spent the next half-hour carving an 8.5-mile path through nearly a quarter of the city. The twister — 1.5 miles wide when it first touched down — killed 26 people, destroyed or damaged roughly 8,800 homes, and reduced eighty percent of downtown's plate glass windows to shards. By the time it lifted near the Lubbock Municipal Airport, it was the costliest tornado in U.S. history…
