Impact of worst tornado outbreak in Mercer County still felt 40 years later

MERCER COUNTY, Pa. — The last few years have proven that tornadoes do happen in western Pennsylvania. We’ve had dozens of touchdowns since 2021. But nothing has ever come close to what happened forty years ago on May 31, 1985.

The single worst tornado outbreak in Western Pennsylvania’s history. 16 tornadoes on our side of the state. Four of them, EF4s and the only ever recorded EF5 in Pennsylvania, ravaged much of southern Mercer County.

Fortunately, then 12-year-old, Nikki Patrina, and her family weren’t home when the EF5 tornado badly damaged their house.

Every single tree on their one-acre property was damaged or destroyed. Sadly, the Patrinas lost their next-door neighbor when her home’s chimney collapsed on her.

For others, survival that day might have been a matter of luck.

It was an outbreak that not only impacted people’s lives but also how they responded to severe weather.

“After that, I was an eighth grader here at Ingomar Middle School in the North Allegheny School District. My science teachers, Mr. Glaspey and Mr. Meyer, had weather radios we would use in class sometimes. We knew that was going to be a bad weather day, and I begged my teachers to let me take one of the weather radios home for the weekend. Mr. Meyer was a little hesitant, but Mr. Glaspey said ‘Go ahead, just don’t break it.’ I took the weather radio home and listened to five straight hours of tornado warnings,” said Patrina.

Carla Hudson was only one year old, living in Farrell, just south of Sharon, in Mercer County. Even though she has no memory of that day, she does believe that knowing about the tornado and how her mother reacted afterward could have possibly impacted her fear of severe weather as a child.

369 million dollars in property damage in Pennsylvania alone that day. Today, with more communities, more businesses, more people, the death toll and damage could be far, far worse. Historic. Not an overstatement at all, especially for those who lived through it four decades ago.

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