The Great Miami Tornado of 1997

I was a fourth year medical student at the University of Miami. We lived on the hospital campus, on the top floor of a large pink high rise which housed numerous hospital staff and medical students. It was convenient: it only took me five minutes to walk to the hospital for my clinical rotations. There was a grocery store and a restaurant. The building also housed my one year old daughter’s day care center. It had a swimming pool on the roof, and stunning views of the Miami skyline and Biscayne Bay behind it.


I had finished my internal medicine rotation for the day: my patients were all signed out to the resident on call. I came back to the apartment for a few minutes, and kicked back in the easy chair while I waited for Libby to finish her nap, and I could pick her up. I flipped the television over to the afternoon soap operas.

All My Children was unexpectedly pre-empted by a special report. The station was broadcasting the view from the TowerCam at the top of the SunTrust Tower, downtown on Brickell Avenue. High-rise office buildings were in the picture- as well as a large black funnel cloud. The funnel stretched down to the street below, and was as tall as the high-rises which it stood next to.

It had to be some kind of joke. It looked like those stupid emails that get forwarded around the internet: giant tornadoes threatening to engulf some weird place or another. You know the ones I’m talking about: the ones with the heading “Unbelievable!!! You have to see this!!!”

But this was indeed a live picture from downtown Miami, and that was indeed a tornado. It was not a little wispy funnel like we sometimes see associated with our summer thunderstorms, nor was it a waterspout, spinning harmlessly offshore. This was a tornado which most definitely did not belong in downtown Miami, on a fairly sunny day, no less. If it were in Oklahoma, I could believe what I was seeing. But this was almost beyond comprehension.

Anticipating our disbelief, the weatherman came on the air. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is for real. This is an extremely dangerous situation. You must take cover immediately!”

I went cold. Being fascinated by tornadoes in books and television shows was one thing; having a real tornado actually bearing down on you was quite another. I was terrified.

Even though, from my study of tornadoes, the last thing you want to do is to run outside and check it out, I headed down the hall to the fire escape balcony, and looked over to the east. There it was, just like on the TowerCam. It was quiet outside, but I thought that I heard a roar in the distance. I was frozen in place for a moment.

But then I thought of Libby and all of her little baby friends, downstairs, napping next to a wall of plate glass windows.

I completely panicked. I was eighteen floors above her, and I needed to get there. In my state of panic, I decided that the elevator would be too risky- what if the power suddenly went out and I couldn’t get down there?

I flew eighteen floors down the fire escape stairs.

I am sure the teachers thought I was a little whacked when I burst into the school and told them that there was a tornado heading toward us, but still agreed to come with me and to take all of the babies into the ground floor hallway of the apartment building, away from the plate glass windows of the day care.

We stayed there for a few minutes, waiting. Someone finally told us that the threat had passed, that the tornado had crossed the bay and was now moving over the hotels on Collins Avenue. In reality, the tornado was actually moving away from us rather than towards us, but I was too scared to stop and decide which way it was moving at the time. I felt like an idiot when I heard that, but I still think that I would have done the same thing over again. We brought the babies back to the school, and my daughter and I took the elevator home.

Later, we learned that the tornado appeared out of a fairly unassuming thunderstorm west of Little Havana. It pulled a few roofs off some old apartment buildings near Calle Ocho, and proceeded downtown, where it basically scared the pants off the corporate executives in their 23rd floor offices. It caused surprisingly little damage to the skyscrapers, and only caused minor damage, flipping a single car, I believe, once it crossed the bay.

Needless to say, the story made the national news. The picture was on the cover of The Miami Herald the next morning.

The 1997 Miami tornado- from the Miami Herald (our apartment was off to the left of this picture, more toward the northwest)

The information for this post, by the way, was a little hard to find. If this had happened in 2010, there would have been innumerable pictures, videos and eyewitness reports submitted instantly to The Weather Channel, by tornado junkies like me. But in honor of Tornado Week, I thought I’d share this story.