Friday marks the 25th anniversary of the deadly F-3 tornado that touched down in Downtown Fort Worth. NBC 5’s Larry Collins tells us about the damage it caused and how one of the largest cities in Texas recovered.
For many in Fort Worth, 25 years passed in the blink of an eye. Looking at its busy and bustling downtown area, you’d never know it was heavily damaged 20 years ago during a deadly F3 tornado.
NBC 5 meteorologists were already tracking the storm when it intensified into a tornado in the 6 p.m. hour on March 28, 2000.
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WATCH HERE“That was a very memorable storm,” Senior Meteorologist David Finfrock recalled. “I think this was a storm to be reckoned with and something you're going to remember.”
Finfrock was on the air that night giving weather updates when cameras in downtown Fort Worth captured the powerful tornado live on air.
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SIGN UP “It was really spectacularly lucky that we were able to have a camera at that site to see the debris when the tornado reached downtown Fort Worth,” Finfrock said. “And to tell you the truth, I was just flabbergasted. It took my breath away for a moment.”
The City of Fort Worth’s record of major damage paints a vivid picture:
“The nine-story Cash America building was nearly gutted; all windows were blown out, and parts of its stone façade collapsed. Mallick Tower lost most of its glass exterior. The 35-story Bank One Tower — now known affectionately as The Tower — suffered catastrophic damage, losing nearly all of its windows. Debris from the city’s tallest buildings rained down onto the streets below, rendering parts of downtown blocked off and dangerous to travel through for days.”
When NBC 5 reporters reached the scene, they found chaos.
Then-reporter Scott Gordon’s live report detailed the devastation as glass still fell from shattered windows.
“Hundreds and hundreds of windows in virtually every big building downtown, every skyscraper just blown apart and glass filling the streets with a lot of other debris,” Gordon reported. “A lot of the people were warning us that a lot of the glass is still falling… that is a danger, a big danger right now to people on the sidewalk and to the emergency workers.”
According to the City of Fort Worth, two people died.
“One person was killed by a collapsing brick wall; another died when a truck was overturned near the Montgomery Ward distribution center,” a Fort Worth release said.
Eighty others were injured, and there was around $450 million in property damage.
Fort Worth native and NBC 5 Anchor Deborah Ferguson also tracked the storm’s devastation that night. While she reported on the storm, her family was in its path.
“It's like ‘I got to get to my mom,’ but I can't get to my mom. So, I started calling my husband, ‘Find my mom. Will you go to my mom?’ He goes, ‘Are you OK?’ ‘Yes, I'm fine. I'm in the newsroom, but I'm worried about my mom,'” Ferguson recalled. “It was 25 years ago, and we didn't have the technology that we have now. It really was some anxious moments waiting for him to call back and to say, ‘I got to your mom. She's OK.’”
Former Fort Worth Mayor Mike Moncrief also remembers that night well. He was a state senator at the time and was close to the epicenter with his family having dinner.
His daughter-in-law’s phone call would alert him to the severity of the situation.
“She said it looks like a bomb went off down here. She said there were large pieces of plate glass in the roadway. She said there was trash everywhere,” Moncrief recalled. “We drove downtown. We observed what literally did look like a bomb went off.”
Moncrief said those moments were nothing short of profoundly impactful.
“It just shows you what Mother Nature can do when she's not happy and what [God] is capable of to remind us of how fortunate we are,” Moncrief said. “Sometimes it takes that kind of incident to serve as a wake-up call.”
According to the City of Fort Worth, to this day, it is the only tornado in the city's history to have caused fatalities.
“You get the news that somebody has died. You don't know who that person is. I knew my mom lived in that area where the tornado hit. I knew it wasn't my mom,” Ferguson said. “But, this was somebody's family member. Somebody loved this person and had no idea until that moment that somebody had died.”
A third person died in Fort Worth before the tornado formed. Hail was blamed.
“There was a 16-year-old who had a new truck out in the driveway, and he ran out to get it and try to move it to a place where it wouldn't be damaged. And he was struck on the head by a softball-sized hailstone,” Finfrock said. “That's the only hail fatality I recall seeing in my 50 years on the air here at Channel 5.”
City leaders said the affected areas have rebounded from that dark chapter in the city’s history.
“I think that it had an impact on a lot of people's faith. It proved the resilience of the city of Fort Worth,” Moncrief said. “That's Fort Worth. That's the way we roll. It's going to continue to show the rest of the nation how a great city not only exists, but shines in the darkest of night.”
The same storm system would also spawn a second F3 tornado that struck South Arlington and Grand Prairie.
