The only EF 5 ever recorded in Louisiana

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In the early morning hours of February 21, 1971, Bill Keating reported to work at the National Weather Service Bureau in Shreveport. The forecast was typical for February in North Louisiana: warm southerly winds, thunderstorms, scattered showers. But he made note of a low pressure system moving east across South Central Texas that had a cold front following behind. As the morning wore on, Keating became increasingly certain the cold air mass from Texas would hit the warm air near the northeast border of Louisiana—a recipe for tornadoes. He issued a tornado watch for northeastern Louisiana and northwest Mississippi, just before noon.

Within a few hours, the two air masses collided exactly where Keating predicted they would. In the town of Delhi, Louisiana—a small community of under three thousand people, less than forty miles from Louisiana’s northeast border—the sky grew dark, and the wind began to howl. Keating knew it was only a matter of time before the funnel clouds descended.

At about 3:20 pm, a large tornado touched down just southeast of Delhi. It was the first of dozens of tornadoes that would strike that day across northeast Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta region.

Willie Young, a railroad worker, was in the area with his family when the funnel met the earth, and acted quickly to move his family to safety under a bridge. Young later told a reporter that “it looked like a thousand hells.”


Just a few miles southeast of Delhi was a small settlement lining the banks of Joe’s Bayou, on a road of the same name. There stood a small sharecropper’s hut inhabited by the Lenore family. Ten of the thirteen family members were at home that Sunday; the other three were out of town.

The hut stood no chance against the tearing winds; it was shredded to a pile of sticks and strewn across a few hundred yards in a matter of seconds. Six members of the Lenore family were immediately thrown to their deaths during the storm They landed in a field at least two hundred yards away, across the bayou from the hut. One was sent to the hospital with severe injuries to his back, and others were missing for days. A family inside a vehicle nearby narrowly escaped with their lives, moments before the tornado picked up the car and tossed it atop the fresh ruins of the Lenore home.

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