Expert: Historic San Angelo Storm of 1995 Wasn't a Tornado

Is it from that storm, or just a stock photo? ...cause...that looks like a tornado...

I was stationed at Goodfellow at the time. I was the the Disaster Preparedness flight on base. All the damage I witness was wind related and hail. There was no tornado damage from myself driving from College Hills to the base. By base damage was the metal roofs pealed back in one direction as were the street lights and advertisement signs, no bark or leaves on the trees, hail covered up the ground from chadbourne to the base

I lived right down the street from the fire training grounds on South Concho Park Drive. I had softball to basketball sized hail break every window on all four sides of my home. Call it what you want but you can't break all sides, all windows, and deposit ice at speed without at least a little rotation!
So, call it what you want but I'll always remember my wife yelling "I hear the train! I hear the train!" confirming a little tornado lore. My closest feeling to being in a movie ... TWISTER!

Hail didn’t put our wooden fence in our trees. Just saying....

I remember the storm... I lived over on the Southwest side at the time... I looked up in the sky and saw a hugantic wall of black cloud rolling in that looked more like a looming cliff face, than it did a cloud.

I of course stayed outside to experience the storm in classic, "Lt. Dan" style, until it started ripping the fence apart. The stories that I heard circulating at the time, were of a tornado touching down by the airport... I didn't care what happened, when the siren's went off and you could barely stand leaning into the wind, I knew it was the strongest storm that I had come across.

Very few have come close since, maybe 2 or 3 might be comparable. I was just talking to my wife about this storm the other day, I don't remember a tornado having hit San Angelo in my lifetime, but then again, I wasn't born in the early 40's to have witnessed the lakeview tornado of 53.

I was also in the Disaster Preparedness Flight during that storm. I can remember that the roof of the billeting office was peeled up on one corner, as Mark Espinosa said, but I also remember a tree behind the Child Care Center toppled straight on top of a building, and severe damage to a couple other buildings on base. I remember driving through the neighborhood along Ft. McKavitt Rd as well, and there were many houses that had damage on 3 sides. To me, that indicates rotation as well, as Shadows Ryder said. My supervisor, who lived on Tres Rios, had every window in his house blown out due to hail. You can't tell me that's just straight line winds. Seems there has to be rotation in there somewhere.

I was at a church youth gathering at the youth pastor's house. I can't remember specifically, but I believe it was somewhere on the outer edges of town. We were in the swimming pool and it started raining really hard. Most of the teens and adults got out of the pool, but a few, including myself and the youth pastor, continued swimming up until it started hailing. Of course, we then decided it was time to exit the pool and go inside. The storm and winds were heavier than usual, but we had no idea how bad it actually was until it was over and we headed back home. None of us knew there was a "tornado" until after we saw all the hail and destruction. Up until now, we all believed that tornadoes (we never actually saw) had gone through town. I remember all the hail looked like a foot of snow.