This is what N.J. looked like when 7 tornadoes hit in 1989. ‘It sounded like incoming artillery.’ – NJ.com

The sky turned black — pitch black — as ominous clouds gathered on a balmy Thursday morning.

An unseasonably warm and overcast day across New Jersey had suddenly grown sinister just after 11 a.m. Then the eerie, dark sky erupted as a line of violent thunderstorms rolled through.

Winds intensified. Sheets of rain blew sideways. Debris flew through the air.

And it was only the beginning.

“It was a very different-looking world out there for a few minutes,” a woman in the Essex County township of North Caldwell told The Star-Ledger on that November day three decades ago. “The sky was very, very black and the wind was twisting the trees right over.”

Chaos unfolded across a large swath of the Garden State just a week before Thanksgiving, as New Jersey became the unlikely target of a rare — and destructive — force of nature: A tornado outbreak.

And not just any tornado outbreak. Nov. 16, 1989 spawned the largest flare-up of twisters in state history, an especially unique weather phenomenon in the fall season.

Exactly 30 years ago today, parts of the Garden State looked more like Kansas, Oklahoma, or another distant state in “Tornado Alley.” The day would end with seven tornadoes touching down in seven different New Jersey counties as a fierce cluster of thunderstorms known as “super cells” roared through the area — all in the span of about 90 minutes.

“It got very dark, very windy… and there was a roar and the windows started shaking,” said Bill Thomas, operations manager at an appliance store in the Morris County town of East Hanover. “It came up one, two, three and then it was over, just like that.”

In its official storm reports issued that month, the National Weather Service called it “one of the worst outbreaks of severe weather experienced in this area.”

Two deaths were reported in New Jersey from the storms, although neither was directly linked to the tornadoes. Several people suffered minor injuries, and dozens more were affected as trees were uprooted, gas lines were ruptured, cars were crushed and roofs were torn apart. Witness accounts painted scenes of panic and disbelief.

Scott Rosenbaum, a construction supervisor at the Castle Ridge housing development in East Hanover, said he was inside his office when one of the twisters hit.

“Sheets of rain came, and strong winds,” he told The Star-Ledger that day. “You could see roof shingles flying everywhere. People came running out of their homes screaming and crying.”

Shock and awe

Even 30 years later, Jim Eberwine, a retired National Weather Service meteorologist, still expresses a sense of awe and surprise over the tornado outbreak.

Awe over the huge number of twisters and the widespread destruction they caused, even though they were on the lower levels of the tornado intensity scale. And surprise over the timing.

“I wasn’t surprised by the stormy weather. I was surprised it was happening in mid-November,” said Eberwine, who was sitting at his work station on the ninth floor of the National Weather Service office in downtown Philadelphia that morning. He was monitoring weather maps and black-and-white radar images that the weather service’s Atlantic City office transmitted to the Philly office.

“I remember standing there, saying, ’This is November. What the heck is this?’ ” he recalled. “We didn’t expect to see an outbreak like that in November.”

Also unusual, he said, was the time of day the outbreak started. Severe thunderstorms and tornado outbreaks are far more common in the late afternoon or early evening, especially on days when the atmosphere grows more unstable from intense daytime heating. The 1989 outbreak erupted at 11:15 a.m., and the last twister touched down at 12:25 p.m., with some thunderstorms lingering into the mid-afternoon.

The rare November tornado outbreak was triggered by a turbulent atmospheric setup — which was eerily similar to the stormy weather pattern New Jersey just experienced on Halloween, when a small tornado touched down in Morris County, Eberwine noted.

A large mass of warm, moist air was pushed up from the Gulf region by strong winds, leaving a plume of warm air hovering over New Jersey and most of the eastern United States that morning in 1989. Then a strong cold front moved in from the Great Lakes and pushed much colder air into the warm air, creating a turbulent clash that resulted in a narrow band of powerful thunderstorms known as a squall line.

Weather setups like that usually cause instability in the atmosphere, triggering rain showers and some thunderstorms, but not an outbreak of tornadoes, Eberwine said. Especially early in the day. Especially during the normally cool month of November.

Forecasters 30 years ago didn’t have access to high-tech, high-resolution Doppler radar systems with bright colorization to help spot rotating winds, Eberwine said. Instead, meteorologists tracked bad weather with older radar systems, frontal maps printed out in black and white and frequent communications with weather service offices across the region.

There was no access to smartphones or social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook in those days, so the weather service relied on TV news, radio stations and NOAA weather radios to get alerts out about dangerous storms approaching.

‘Phones were ringing off the hook’

Even with the older technology, Eberwine said in a recent interview, “forecasters were aware we were in for a rough day.”

They just didn’t realize it would be as rough as they anticipated, he said, until his office started getting bombarded with storm damage reports.

“The phones were ringing off the hook, because it was happening so fast,” Eberwine recalled. “Trees down, telephone poles down, and we were thinking, ‘Wow.’ ”

Some people called to report funnel clouds touching down, Eberwine said. And with so much stormy weather occurring in the morning and early afternoon over a wide geographic area, forecasters were concerned about children traveling on school buses.

As the day went on, more ominous storm reports trickled in from emergency management officials and news outlets:

• A house in Piscataway was reduced to rubble, with a 15-month-old baby trapped under debris.
• The roof was torn off a department store in Asbury Park.
• A downed tree crushed a car in Maplewood.
• An uprooted tree ruptured a natural gas line in Nutley, forcing the evacuation of 20 homes.
• Powerful winds pushed two tractor-trailers onto their sides on the Goethals Bridge, one on the Elizabeth side and one on the Staten Island side.

The driver of the overturned truck on the New Jersey side of the bridge was killed in the mishap, and a passenger was hospitalized with head injuries, The Star-Ledger reported at the time.

Officials determined the truck fatality was not directly related to a tornado, but it was clearly part of the turbulent storm system that tore through New Jersey. Fierce thunderstorm winds that day also claimed the life of a 67-year-old Camden man, who was literally blown off the ground and landed on his head on a street in that South Jersey city, according to news reports from the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Courier-Post.

Loud roaring sounds

One tornado that tore through Linden in Union County roared so loudly, “it sounded like incoming artillery,” said Louis Salz, a Vietnam War veteran who was co-owner of the Linden Motor Freight warehouse complex.

Workers reported seeing a funnel cloud spin through a field and the trucking complex, where it sent shards of steel and metal pipes flying around, punching hundreds of holes in the ceiling of one building and causing walls to collapse onto several cars and trucks.

“I was afraid my truck would turn over. I was hanging on for dear life,” one tractor-trailer driver recalled after the powerful winds ripped across the trucking complex, where he was making a delivery of chemical drums. “That was the closest I’ve ever been to a tornado. I don’t want to get this close again.”

Gladys Muller, a cashier at an Exxon station in Frankford in Sussex County, saw a funnel cloud and feared her car would be sucked into the churning winds.

“It was horrible,” she told The Star-Ledger. “I felt like the front of the car was going to lift up. It was scary. It was like smoke was swirling all around.”

A lucky break in Bergen County

One of the strongest tornadoes that whirled through New Jersey during the 1989 outbreak cut one town a lucky break.

Residents of Lyndhurst in Bergen County remember seeing the sky quickly turn dark and a funnel cloud spin across their township. It zig-zagged down several streets — but miraculously left local homes and businesses unscathed, said Jerry Onnembo, a retired police officer who was working as a lieutenant at the time.

“We were thinking, ‘Oh my God.’ This type of thing doesn’t happen in this area,” Onnembo recalled this week, saying people in his hometown were stunned when the twister arrived, then even more surprised when it meandered in different directions, like a confused driver.

“It made a left-hand turn onto River Road. It went down River Road for about a block onto Page Avenue. It took a left onto Page Avenue, heading back towards the river,” the retired cop said. “When it got down to the river, it made a right turn, missing structures, and it went into the county park.”

Riverfront County Park was where the tornado toppled some trees before lifting up.

“Boy we were lucky,” Onnembo said. “We were blessed. We had no injuries, no structural damage.”

Windows pounded by rain

New Jersey State Climatologist David Robinson, a Rutgers University professor who oversees the Rutgers NJ Weather Network, was in his second year of teaching at Rutgers when the outbreak occurred.

He said it was associated with a strong cold front that not only raced through the eastern United States, but also through parts of Canada on that unseasonably warm day. “As it struck Central New Jersey, I was on the phone with a colleague in Toronto and he was recounting how the front had blasted through there before dawn,” Robinson recalled.

“It was late morning, and within minutes, rain began pouring down and the wind started blowing strongly outside my Livingston campus office” in Piscataway, Robinson said. “I recall my office windows getting pounded with rain and fogging up, so the wind had to be coming from a generally southwest direction.”

The Livingston campus is only about a mile away from the Yorktowne Square housing development, which was hit hard by one of the seven tornadoes that touched down in New Jersey that day.

One house in the development was completely demolished, and the homeowner crawled through the wreckage to rescue his 15-month-old daughter, who was covered by debris but was not hurt, The Star-Ledger reported at the time. About a dozen other homes in the development were damaged by the twister.

More unusual weather in 1989

The big tornado outbreak in New Jersey that day was preceded by a deadly tornado outbreak in the southern United States just one day earlier, when a powerful F4 twister killed 21 people in Alabama. The same line of storms that swept across the Garden State on Nov. 16 triggered a strong downdraft that caused the partial collapse of an elementary school in Orange County, New York, killing nine students.

That deadly school disaster was initially blamed on a small-scale tornado, but weather officials later determined it was caused by a powerful burst of wind that shot down from thunderstorm clouds, hit the ground and slammed into the school.

Just four days after the outbreak, a small tornado touched down in Seaside Park in Ocean County, ripping the roof off a building and blowing out the windows of a car, according to a 1989 storm report from the National Weather Service.

Robinson said the cold front that triggered the tornadoes and violent thunderstorms in November 1989 marked a major pattern shift in the weather across North America. Just a week after the twisters, a snowstorm blanketed Central New Jersey with about 5 inches of snow on Thanksgiving.

“Even more remarkably, the new pattern persisted into December, resulting in the coldest New Jersey December since 1895,” Robinson noted. The pattern then flipped again when the calendar turned to 1990, with a warm January not only in New Jersey but nationwide.

Len Melisurgo may be reached at LMelisurgo@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @LensReality or like him on Facebook. Find NJ.com on Facebook.