May 31, 1985: 'I heard a noise like a train.' Remembering the Albion-Cranesville tornado

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Erie County Deputy Coroner Lyell Cook and his wife were driving home to Girard from Erie on May 31, 1985.
At Kmart on West 26th Street, they saw carts careening through the parking lot in the wind. When the couple reached Walnut Creek Hill in Fairview, the sun shone through a single opening in an otherwise ominous sky.
"The clouds were just roiling, and there was this single spot of sun. My father called that a sun dog. He always said that when you saw that, there was a tornado under it," Cook said.
Soon after, the couple stopped for dinner at a Girard tavern.
"It was really hot for May, and they had the front door propped open. Then all of a sudden what sounded like every siren in Erie County went off and kept going and going and going," Cook said. "Firetrucks, ambulances, police cars — anything with a siren went whipping past. Then my voice pager went off and (Coroner) Merle (Wood) said, 'Grab some cots and as many sheets and things as you can and meet me in Albion."
The tornado that hit Albion and Cranesville that Friday afternoon 40 years ago formed in Ohio just west of the Pennsylvania line, according to NOAA storm data.
At 5:05 p.m., a Pennsylvania state trooper saw the tornado at Pennside, southwest of Albion, and moving toward the town. The National Weather Service office at Erie issued a tornado warning for southern Erie County at 5:13 p.m.
The storm hit Albion just a minute or two later, killing nine and leveling an eight-to-10 block area and two mobile home parks. The tornado moved on to Cranesville, where residents later told reporters they saw what looked like the roof of a house spinning in the funnel cloud as it approached.
In Cranesville, three people died and 13 mobile homes were destroyed, according to NOAA data.
A tornado also touched down outside Corry, injuring more people and causing additional property damage.
The worst of the damage was in Albion and Cranesville, where more than 80 people were injured and 309 buildings were destroyed or damaged. The storm packed wind speeds up to 260 mph, rating as F-4 on the Fujita scale that determines wind speed by tornado damage.
When Travis Pettis looked out the front door of her home on First Avenue in Albion that Friday afternoon, she saw the neighbor across the street race to the front of his house and get his kids into their truck.
The door of Pettis' home was vibrating.
"And as I'm standing there watching, I heard a noise like a train," Pettis recalled.
It wasn't unusual. The house was about three blocks from rail tracks through the town.
"But we always heard a whistle when there was a train, and there was no whistle. It was the sound that was the trigger, and I always felt that it was God that put it into my mind that this was a tornado."
Pettis' husband, Bob Pettis, was in Cranesville with a Youth for Christ group picking rocks from a farmer's field. Their sons Joshua, 7; Matthew, 5; and Stephen, 4, were watching TV near a picture window in their First Avenue living room.
"I gathered them up and we went straight down to the basement," Pettis said.
Wind, dirt and debris smashed the only window in the basement as Pettis and her boys huddled and prayed.
"I had them shut their eyes. There was all this dirt and debris coming down and flying out of the furnace area," Pettis said.
When it was over, the family went upstairs.
"Our house was the fourth house from the main street, and it was the first house from the main street that was standing," Pettis said. "Even across the street, all the houses were down."
An elderly woman in the house directly across the street had been sitting in a chair near the front window. She survived.
"But she ended up in the back yard in that chair," Pettis said.
In the Pettis' living room where the boys had been watching television, a beam had come through the window and was impaled in the opposite wall. Sheets from an upstairs bedroom were caught between a living room wall and the ceiling.
"The whole wall had ballooned out and slapped back, and the sheets were pinned in the crease where the wall met the ceiling," Pettis said.
It was later determined that the house had been moved from its foundation and that the roof had been torn off and brought back down. The house had to be demolished, its structure most likely buried at Albion Borough Park.
"At the west end of the park, near the arena where there are shows during the Albion Fair, is a big hilly hump that's grassed over now. All the debris from Albion was buried there," Pettis said.
Northwestern School District business manager Paul Sachar had been delivering packets for a coming school board meeting to school directors that Friday afternoon and was heading home to Cranesville when his brother-in-law, a ham radio operator, called and advised him to go back to Albion.
"He said there had been a tornado and it had caused some damage, but he didn't know how severe," Sachar, now retired, said.
Just weeks before, Sachar had agreed to serve as the district's emergency management coordinator at the request of schools Superintendent Andrew Hills.
"He said that we needed to designate an emergency management person and that there probably wouldn't be much that I needed to do," Sachar said. "Then in a month or a little over a month we were faced with a major crisis."
Though just blocks away from some of the worst storm damage, schools on Northwestern's Albion campus were untouched. A temporary morgue was set up at Northwestern High School. Northwestern school buses helped transport the injured to hospitals.
The American Red Cross and later the Federal Emergency Management Agency, insurance companies and other service providers set up shop in the schools. The superintendent's office became a kind of command center for operations, and clothing, building supplies and other items from donors nationwide were stored and distributed in a school gym through summer.
"I ended up almost living there for a time, even sleeping there, taking care of things. I spent a lot of hours helping there that entire summer," Sachar said.
The outpouring of help, donations and support was incredible, he said.
"It was amazing how generous people were in reaching out to us and giving," Sachar said. "There was a group, from Michigan, I think, that came and helped people rebuild."
After Lyell Cook got to Albion, he went to investigate a death reported on Pearl Street, in one of the town's hardest-hit neighborhoods.
It was strangely peaceful after the storm.
"The sun was out. Birds were flying. But everything was just flat. There was water spraying out of pipes where houses were knocked down," Cook, Erie County coroner since 2000, said.
"And here were these two old guys sitting among the wreckage playing cards like nothing had happened. And some guy in a jogging outfit came up, running in place, and said, 'Some storm, right?'"
At Northwestern High School, people came to look for missing relatives or friends at the temporary morgue.
"The electric was out and we used flashlights and lanterns as it got dark," Cook said. "When people started coming, we had them describe who they were looking for, and if someone met that description, we would take them back and pull the sheet back. It didn't take long before everyone was identified."
Cook had dealt with plane crashes and other horrendous calls, but the tornado, he said, was devastating.
"I'd never encountered that sort of thing. It was incredible, almost surreal," Cook said. "Sometimes I think I've blocked some of it out. We did what we had to do and got it taken care of. But it was a terrible thing. I hope I never have to do anything like that again."
Albion and Cranesville weren't the only communities devasted by tornados on May 31, 1985.
In Crawford County, 11 people died, five of them when a tornado hit Atlantic, a small town about seven miles from Meadville off Route 18.
In Venango County, eight people were killed when a tornado touched down near Cooperstown and moved on through Oakland and Cherrytree townships.
In all, 43 tornadoes hit Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and Ontario, killing 89 people and injuring more than 1,000, according to NOAA's 40th anniversary summary of the outbreak.
The storms made national and international news.
Will Rogers, now Albion mayor, was serving with the military in Korea in May 1985.
"I was walking past a TV room. CNN was on and reporting that a tornado had hit western Pennsylvania," Rogers recalls. "I stepped in and heard that parts of Albion had been destroyed."
It took some time for Rogers to reach out to family and friends.
"You couldn't just text people then. It took a little doing to get through and make sure everybody was OK," Rogers said.
Contact Valerie Myers at [e-mail].
This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: 'It was surreal': The Albion-Cranesville tornado of May 31, 1985