Iron Bowl Memories

In our prime time weather special a few weeks ago, we featured a story on the Alabama-Auburn game on December 3, 1983. Auburn won the game 23-20, with some of the stars including Bo Jackson, Lionel James, and Mike Shula. Bo ran for 256 yards in the game, one of the best college efforts of his career. During the game I was staffing the Channel 13 weather center, rather tired following a long night of severe flooding. Conditions were favoring more severe weather during the afternoon.

Sure enough, severe thunderstorms formed rapidly over west Alabama by mid-afternoon, and it looked like our worst nightmare was happening in front of our very eyes. The old Enterprise radar receiver, showing data from the WSR-57 system down at Centreville, showed a classic “hook echo” signature on a storm headed right toward Birmingham, where the Iron Bowl was being played at a packed Legion Field. A tornado warning was issued for Jefferson county during the second half of the game, and Simpson Pepper read the tornado warning over the public address system near the end of the third quarter. Oddly enough, the game was never stopped as a tremendous downpour moved over the stadium with strong winds and lots of lightning.

There is no doubt this was the biggest storm ever to hit during an Iron Bowl game. A tornado did not touch down at the stadium, but if it would have happened it would have been one of the worst natural disasters in our nation’s history. Later, the same storm did drop an F3 tornado at Oxford, killing two people in a supermarket and injuring over 50 other people.

During our special it was fascinating to hear Keith Jackson of ABC Sports describe the storm, and our own J.B. Elliott, who was working for the National Weather Service at the time, tell how the warning process worked that day.