Sixteen Years Ago -- Fort Worth Tornado
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When standing under these giant steel beams that once supported a billboard, it's hard not to be in awe of the power of the wind that bowed them over. Photos don't do them justice; you realize this when you are looking up at them They are behind the Bailey Street post office whose parking lot you can park in, then just walk behind the post office and you can stand under them and try to imagine what it must have been like to be there on March 28 2000 or better yet be thankful you weren't there.
Other than the beams there isn't much today to see related to the tornado however just west of downtown Fort Worth is the square white building called Mallick Tower which took a near-direct hit from the tornado. I have photos of it from back then and you can almost see through the building in some of them; the building has since been gutted and remodeled. There are two parking entrances, one marked “reserved parking” and one marked “guest parking” (use that one) Walk inside the glass doors to their lobby and look up and to your left and you will see encased inside of a frame a shard of thick window glass embedded in the wall. Underneath a plaque simply says: “Tornado souvenir, March 28, 2000” And there you have it; the two remaining souvenirs of the March 28, 2000 tornado that can still be seen. You can show them to your kids/grandkids and remind them that these are the reasons they have those warning sirens. Keep watching the skies...because you never know.... I've lived in Texas for 57 years; I've watched many a Texas-sized storm drop large hailstones and rain sideways and seen hurricane-fury-level winds blow over trees. But contrary to what you see in movies like TWISTER, this isn't an everyday event in Texas. In fact it's easy to become complacent about storms in Texas, due to their infrequency. The Native Americans hundreds of years ago believed that the nearby Trinity River somehow protected them from tornadoes. In between 1986 and 1989 I lived on a 58-acre farm in Parker county and my room-mate and I would sit on the front porch of our farmhouse and watch the sky turn dark and with much fascination we would observe rolling storm clouds rumbling towards us and then break up and head north or northeast and blow right past us without as much as a drop of rain. I first saw a funnel cloud when I was about fourteen but it was several miles away. In October of 1984 a storm that was the remnants of a Gulf Coast hurricane actually made its way as far north as Fort Worth and me and a friend rode it out sitting in a VW van in a K-mart parking lot. The rain and the wind was blowing sideways, the parking lot itself began to resemble a waterfall and the van began to rock. It was genuinely scary; we weren't sure if the van was going to remain upright. In June of 1989 a hurricane-velocity storm blew through Fort Worth that knocked over trees and power lines and many parts of the city were without electricity for a week. April and May of 1995 saw many powerful hail storms blow through Fort Worth. But then there was March 28, 2000. There was nothing unusual to signal what was about to happen; it looked pretty much like any other March day outside for most of the day until about 6pm. Then the sky turned a puke-green color as the weathermen on all of the local news broadcasts furrowed their brows and warned the viewers that Things Could Get Ugly; little did we know how right they really were. From my front porch I couldn't see much. The wind was howling and much dirt and debris began to blow up the street in an eastern direction. My front door faced west and I had to close it eventually. I could hear the storm sirens going off as the TV weathermen were warning for Everyone To Take Cover. This lasted for about a half hour; I grabbed my cat and hunkered down in the bathtub and waited for the wind to die down before I dared to take another look outside. Outside things were a mess; street trash, leaves and tree limbs littered my yard, but otherwise nothing to write home about, just another spring storm. On TV it was another matter: they were chattering about a funnel cloud been spotted just a mile or so north of my house and touching down. As it turned out later there was indeed a funnel cloud and it did much more than just touch down. First it tore through the ritzy Rivercrest neighborhood, knocking down trees and leveling a couple of the pricey homes there. Then it skipped over to 7th Street, uprooting trees, knocking out windows and bending steel beams on billboards. Then it zig-zagged over to the lower-income neighborhood of Linwood where it tore roofs off of several homes, then plowed into the massive Montgomery Wards department store, trashed the Johns-Manville roofing supply complex. It then crossed over the Trinity River (so much for the Native Americans theory) and then trashed the multi-story Cash America and Mallick Towers office buildings taking out most of their windows. Then it moved into downtown Fort Worth... It blew glass out of multiple sky-scrapers downtown. Office furniture went sailing through plate-glass windows and onto the streets below. Broken glass sprayed down on the streets for hours after the funnel cloud passed, dangling precariously in the wind before snapping and falling. The funnel cloud then roared down I30 and went to Arlington, where it did a lot of damage to residential neighborhoods there. The town was a mess for many days afterward; many streets were closed to prevent looting, traffic lights weren't functioning and the streets were littered with a myriad of broken glass, screws and nails. Fort Worth had seen some bad storms before but this was something else altogether. It's been sixteen years since that day and most of the damage has been repaired, replaced or just plain bulldozed. The only remaining evidence of that day today are four large steel beams from a billboard that remain at the intersection known as the Six Points where Camp Bowie Blvd, 7th Street, Bailey and University streets all meet. The huge beams are bowed over from the force of the wind as if they were bowing in respect of the majestic fury of Mother Nature and stand today as a reminder to us all to pay heed when the tornado sirens go off. UPDATE When standing under these giant steel beams that once supported a billboard, it's hard not to be in awe of the power of the wind that bowed them over. Photos don't do them justice; you realize this when you are looking up at them They are behind the Bailey Street post office whose parking lot you can park in, then just walk behind the post office and you can stand under them and try to imagine what it must have been like to be there on March 28 2000 or better yet be thankful you weren't there. Other than the beams there isn't much today to see related to the tornado however just west of downtown Fort Worth is the square white building called Mallick Tower which took a near-direct hit from the tornado. I have photos of it from back then and you can almost see through the building in some of them; the building has since been gutted and remodeled. There are two parking entrances, one marked “reserved parking” and one marked “guest parking” (use that one) Walk inside the glass doors to their lobby and look up and to your left and you will see encased inside of a frame a shard of thick window glass embedded in the wall. Underneath a plaque simply says: “Tornado souvenir, March 28, 2000” And there you have it; the two remaining souvenirs of the March 28, 2000 tornado that can still be seen. You can show them to your kids/grandkids and remind them that these are the reasons they have those warning sirens. Keep watching the skies...because you never know.... 
Mallick Tower plaque inside foyer
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