Marking the first week of April, high winds lashed Clark County.
Power went out. Trees did face-plants in the street. And people wondered just how strong those winds were.
It depends on which April you have in mind, and the difference between them was more than 100 mph.
Friday’s winds, which interrupted traffic on local roads and left 5,000 power customers without electricity, approached 40 mph.
It was a timely reminder of a much more powerful spring blow. On April 5, 1972, Vancouver was hit by the deadliest tornado in Washington history. Those winds were estimated from 150 to 200 mph.
The twister damaged several buildings in McLoughlin Heights before hitting the original Peter S. Ogden Elementary, which in 1972 was just east of Fort Vancouver High School. Students from Fort Vancouver ran over to pull kids from the rubble; more than 90 were injured,
Less than a mile away, the storm turned deadly when it hit a bowling center and a supermarket near Andresen Drive and Fourth Plain Boulevard. Six people were killed when the buildings collapsed.
With their school in ruins, the Ogden students finished the year split up among three other Vancouver elementary schools — Walnut Grove, Truman and King. But memories of the tornado stayed with them, according to The Columbian’s 40th anniversary story on the storm.
Loren Hascall, one of the Fort Vancouver students who ran to help the grade-schoolers, became a junior high music teacher and had some of those former Ogden kids in his classroom.
“Counselors said some of them were still having trauma on stormy days,” Hascall told The Columbian in 2012. “They gave us a heads-up.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
