[KYHAM] illegal to say TORNADO?

[W8NSV]

Just found this,  thought this might interest some members.  Many years gone by since...

Hard as it may be to believe today, from 1886 until 1952, federal forecasters were banned from using the word "tornado" in forecasts. That ban ended 55 years ago this past weekend. March
19, 2007 

In the 1880s, John P. Finley of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, then handling weather forecasting for the USA, developed generalized forecasts on days tornadoes were most likely. But in 1886, the Army ended Finley's program and banned the word "tornado" from forecasts because "the harm done by a tornado prediction would eventually be greater than that which results form the tornado itself."
The thinking was that people would be trampled in the panic if they heard a tornado was possible. The ban stayed in place after the Weather Bureau, now the National Weather Service, took over forecasting from the Army.  A tornado that wrecked 52 large aircraft at Tinker Air Force Base, Okla., on March 20, 1948, spurred Air Force meteorologists to begin working on ways to forecast tornadoes.  
The Weather Bureau also began looking for ways to improve tornado forecasting and established the Severe Local Storm Warning Center, which is now the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.  The ban on the word "tornado" fell on March 17, 1952, when the new center issued its first tornado watch.
(Information courtesy of Charlie Wilson, host of Internet Partnership Radio; image courtesy of NOAA)
Link> http://blogs.usatoday.com/weather/tornadoes/index.html

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