A deadly severe weather episode unfolded across portions of Central Texas during the afternoon and evening hours on Tuesday, May 27th, 1997. Over roughly six hours, 20 tornadoes touched down across the NWS Dallas/Fort Worth and Austin/San Antonio forecast areas of responsibility. Twenty-eight people were killed by the tornadoes along with one indirect fatality from cardiac arrest. One person drowned in floodwaters along Shoal Creek in Austin. Over 128 million dollars (1997) in damage occurred to property and infrastructure.

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/05696a8e01bc4e91a0a941290a62e86d

Was picking up my kid from school in Cedar Park and saw one on the horizon while driving down the road. It took out an HEB that I had just drove past.

Scary stuff.

Was that the one that hit the high rise in Ft Worth and blew out nearly all of its windows?

ETA: guess not this was the Jarrell tornado. The Ft Worth one was 2000

Saw that big F5 in Jarrell from a distance of a few miles. It was scary as hell even at that distance. Was driving back to my parents house just in time to hear about the Cedar Park tornado mentioned above. If memory serves one of the managers pulled everyone into one of their big freezers and saved quite a few lives.

Wild video of the Jarell tornado

Interesting fact, the last two Jarrell tornados this year apparently followed the same general path (one from the opposite direction).

Jarrell 97 is legendary. It moved ne to sw, so backwards & thus very slowly., resulting in epic damage. Nothing was left, streets of concrete slabs swept bare, everyone killed. Unsurvivable damage. Thankfully so rare.

Left B/CS that day headed home.

Remember seeing weird greenish clouds that seemed ominous.

Turns out they were mammatus clouds.

Watched the coverage of the Jarrell tornado from my trailer off 2818 on channel 5 or whatever it was out of Waco that day. I'll never forget the footage their tower camera got showing that thing. It looked like the perfect tornado you'd see in a movie, just a massive black V shape throwing debris in the air. Wasn't the base a mile wide? Just incredible force of nature.

JSKolache said:

---

Jarrell 97 is legendary. It moved ne to sw, so backwards & thus very slowly., resulting in epic damage. Nothing was left, streets of concrete slabs swept bare, everyone killed. Unsurvivable damage. Thankfully so rare.

---

My step-sister was working as a production assistant at KVUE in Austin when that tornado happened. She didn't usually go out on remote shots but they were sending people all over the place to get coverage and she went in a van to Jarrell.

They were in a devastated neighborhood trying to get set up for a shot and moving some stuff out of the way to have a clear place for the reporter and camera person to stand and found a body while they were moving debris.

She was just out of college and not ready for that.

I was stationed at Hood when this happened. A bunch of us went to Jarrell to help immediately after. Crazy scenes.

Lived in Troy and remembered that day. We were outside playing in the water with friends that lived close by. My mom said to come get inside and we didn't know why. It was a sunny day.

I was home in Salado for the summer, working at a place on the south side of town right off of 35, and watched the start of Jarrell twister. Unreal day.

That Jarrell F5 sucked the pavement off I-35. Probably the strongest tornado to ever hit Texas. The houses it hit were just slabs afterwards and nobody survived. There were actually people who disappeared bc they couldn't find anything left over. Just terrible.