- Oct 9, 1999
- 31,516
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After arguing with another fellow in IRC earlier tonight about Hurricane Dennis, we ended up on the subject of the Columbus Day Storm of 1962, and I ended up coming across an interesting little gem I'm sure a few people here are interested in.
First, if you're not familiar with the storm, on Columbus Day in 1962, the remnants of a typhoon ended up meeting up with a developing pacific storm and then sweeping up to the northwest in to Oregon, hitting the state with a force commonly compared to that of a hurricane, and was the strongest extratropical cyclone of the 20th century to hit the lower 48 states. The resulting storm damaged over 50-thousand homes, and winds in the valley gusted over 100, and over 150 on the Oregon coast(with no one sure just what the max speed was, practically all the equipment on the coast broke); the final cost was over 2 billion dollars in modern-day money. There's a good writeup over at Wikipedia if you're interested in the whole thing.
Now, as for the gem, when the storm hit the Willamette Valley and Salem/Portland areas, it knocked every radio and TV station offline except for KGW radio. A week after the storm hit, KGW put together a 30 minute recap/documentary of the event, complete with scary music(no joke) and a stone-cold announcer to add a bit of drama like only the early 60's could.
Anyhow, someone has managed to retain a copy of that after all of these years and PDXRadio has digitized a copy of it in Real Audio format in 2 parts. It's worth giving a listen to IMO, so here are the links to [l=part 1]http://www.pdxradio.com/kgw1962a.ram] and [l=part 2]http://www.pdxradio.com/kgw1962b.ram].
First, if you're not familiar with the storm, on Columbus Day in 1962, the remnants of a typhoon ended up meeting up with a developing pacific storm and then sweeping up to the northwest in to Oregon, hitting the state with a force commonly compared to that of a hurricane, and was the strongest extratropical cyclone of the 20th century to hit the lower 48 states. The resulting storm damaged over 50-thousand homes, and winds in the valley gusted over 100, and over 150 on the Oregon coast(with no one sure just what the max speed was, practically all the equipment on the coast broke); the final cost was over 2 billion dollars in modern-day money. There's a good writeup over at Wikipedia if you're interested in the whole thing.
Now, as for the gem, when the storm hit the Willamette Valley and Salem/Portland areas, it knocked every radio and TV station offline except for KGW radio. A week after the storm hit, KGW put together a 30 minute recap/documentary of the event, complete with scary music(no joke) and a stone-cold announcer to add a bit of drama like only the early 60's could.
Anyhow, someone has managed to retain a copy of that after all of these years and PDXRadio has digitized a copy of it in Real Audio format in 2 parts. It's worth giving a listen to IMO, so here are the links to [l=part 1]http://www.pdxradio.com/kgw1962a.ram] and [l=part 2]http://www.pdxradio.com/kgw1962b.ram].
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