What you are seeing in the photo documentation is a memorial, located in Wood Memorial Park, at the west side of Sikes Lake.
The memorial makes note of the 45 Wichita Falls natives who died in what is known locally as Terrible Tuesday, or the Red River Valley Tornado Outbreak.
The Wichita Falls tornado that Terrible Tuesday blew through the part of town in which I currently reside.
Since I have been in Texas I have experienced a couple tornados up close.
The worst being a tornado which struck downtown Fort Worth, doing a lot of damage. I was heading into downtown, when I got a call telling me to not come downtown, that it was way too stormy. I could see a dark wall of clouds, but did not know at the time that a tornado was spinning behind those clouds.
The other up close tornado happened when I was located in east Fort Worth. I had the TV on due to the storm and the non-stop coverage, which at some point told me that a tornado was spinning just a short distance south of my location, heading in my direction. I could see the Doppler radar image of the tornado and its direction. When it got about a quarter mile from my location it stopped heading north and started heading east along Interstate 30.
Every Monday at noon the tornado sirens are tested. The sirens are extremely loud.
From the Wikipedia article about the Red River Valley Tornado Outbreak detailing Terrible Tuesday in Wichita Falls...
The most significant tornado of the day was an F4 tornado that began east-northeast of Holliday, Texas, at around 5:50 p.m. CST and moved east-northeast into Wichita Falls, taking a 8 mi (13 km) course through densely populated areas of the city and destroying over two thousand homes across several neighborhoods. The tornado spanned as wide as 1.5 mi (2.4 km) across during its passage through the city, with the most severe damage occurring within a 0.5 mi (0.80 km) wide swath. At least 45 people were killed within the city and nearly 1,800 people were injured, ranking the tornado among the deadliest in Texas history. A majority of the fatalities occurred as the tornado mangled and tossed vehicles. The damage wrought by the Wichita Falls tornado was unprecedented, with the $400 million ($1.865B in 2025 dollars) damage toll making it the costliest tornado on record at the time. The severe weather event was widely observed by scientific instruments due to its serendipitous occurrence during a NASA field campaign. Later studies referred to the tornado outbreak as the Red River Valley Tornado Outbreak, and in the areas affected the day came to be known as Terrible Tuesday.
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