On this day in 1927, a violent, destructive tornado tore a 17-mile path through Northern Virginia, DC and Maryland, amid a torrential, record-setting rainstorm. Only one death was attributed to the storm, from a lightning strike, but the twister was blamed for more than 30 injuries and widespread structural damage.
“Like a whirling dervish the tornado struck a zigzag path from nearby Virginia, through the city, and out into Maryland, where it seems to have spent its force,” The Washington Post wrote on its front page. “Through its mile-wide path the twister strode like a giant, crushing entire blocks of houses, picking others up and tossing them about, nudging over automobiles, until they capsized, and then skipping along like a giant gone mad. Its erratic course was a scene of desolation and devastation, scores of buildings left roofless, others left without walls, and still other standing jagged in the pouring rain, entire sides ripped out.”
The twister destroyed over 200 homes in DC and 300 structures in Alexandria according to the GhostsofDC blog. The Monthly Weather Review, a scientific journal, wrote that the tornado was “probably most intense in Alexandria and in Arlington County and seemed to be rather intense again just before and just after crossing the District-Maryland line.”
In its report on the storm, the New York Times offered this helpful description of the path: “The tornado appears to have been wholly local, having started in the Potomac River with a waterspout, just below Alexandria. It swept over the latter, five miles south of Washington, a place rich in associations of George Washington; headed across the river to the Naval Air Station, passed directly over the Navy Yard, swept a narrow path to Fifteenth and East Capitol Streets, crossing Benning Road near Eighteenth Street, and did some damage at Hyattsville and Bladensburg, Maryland towns, five miles northeast of the capital.”
The Monthly Weather Review wrote that a 93 mph wind gust was clocked at Anacostia Air Station.
Here are other notables from this date:
- Average high: 58
- Average low: 41
- Record high: 77 (1896)
- Record low: 17 (1933)
- Record rainfall: 2.04 inches (1927)
- Record snowfall: Trace (1992)
