Tyler Tubbs was 15 years old, a freshman baseball player at Hempfield Area High School, when a video he recorded of an EF2 tornado touching down March 23, 2011, in his Fort Allen neighborhood went viral.
Now, the 30-year-old project manager lives in Hagerstown, Md., with his wife and two children — ages 3 and 5. Strangers still recognize him from time to time.
“My wife and I, when we go places, I feel like they remember the last name,” Tubbs said. “It makes it a little bit weird sometimes. It’s such an insignificant thing, but people do remember (the video). I don’t think it’s totally forgotten about yet.”
In the aftermath of the storm, county officials estimated the tornado racked up $4.5 million in damages. About 100 buildings — 94 homes and eight businesses — were damaged, including nine residences that were destroyed.
Damage to the school district’s campus, namely the high school’s athletic fields, cost $1.5 million, said then-business manager Jude Abraham.
It took 10 minutes for the tornado to pass through Hempfield and exit Westmoreland County just above New Alexandria, said Christopher Tantlinger, the county’s emergency management chief.
The National Weather Service detected the storm and issued a warning nine minutes before the tornado whisked through the county, he said.
Tubbs’ video — a shaky recording of his exuberant reaction to the menacing, funnel-shaped cloud approaching his front porch — received tens of thousands of views on YouTube and led to weeks of media attention.
He was interviewed by anchors on “Good Morning America,” CNN, The Weather Channel and dozens of radio stations nationwide, Tubbs said. Meteorologist and storm chaser Reed Timmer invited Tubbs to join him on a tornado hunt in the Midwest — an offer the Hempfield student’s mother declined.
“I was like, ‘You realize he’s 15 years old? He’s not doing anything like that,’ ” said Sharon Tubbs, who still lives in the Fort Allen home where the video was recorded.
The video has since raked in more than 622,000 views — adding between 2,000 and 3,000 views each year, Tyler Tubbs said.
“If there’s bad weather or it’s around the anniversary, it always spikes in views,” he said.
Hempfield official hopes tornado ‘remains a distant memory’
But Tubbs is not ignorant of the storm’s impact on his hometown.
“I do feel bad, because it’s such a negative thing, and people actually lost their houses,” he said. “We had no damage to our property, and I did feel bad that I’m out here getting some form of … positive exposure from a tragedy.”
Kathy Charlton, the high school’s principal at the time, did not see it that way.
“It put a light face on the tornado,” she said. “It was interesting, and he was just such a good kid that it just made everyone smile.”
Tubbs and his baseball teammates volunteered with the American Red Cross in the days following the storm, knocking on residents’ doors to see if they needed help.
The high school also raised nearly $10,200 for the Red Cross by selling more than 2,000 T-shirts. Created by then-student Shannon Petersen, the shirts include a tornado design made out of the words Tubbs says in the video.
The storm required an all-hands-on-deck response from township and county officials, said Doug Weimer, chair of Hempfield’s board of supervisors.
The township set up a command center to direct cleanup efforts, and the Red Cross established a temporary shelter at the township building for residents whose homes were damaged. Local volunteer fire departments and public works crews worked practically around the clock to clear debris from roads.
The experience taught the township’s public works and fire crews to work together efficiently, Weimer said. He believes Hempfield is better equipped to handle emergencies moving forward — particularly having added a paid, full-time emergency management coordinator since the 2011 storm.
It took about a week for the township’s roads to be cleared of fallen trees, debris and downed power lines, Weimer said. But it took months for the township to resemble itself again, as residents tracked down sheds, swing sets and above-ground pools that had blown out of their yards during the storm.
“We’re lucky that it wasn’t worse,” he said, “but at the time, you saw that full devastation. You saw that debris everywhere. It was rather shocking for everyone, and we’re hoping that that remains a distant memory.”
It took at least a month for repairs to be made at the high school, Charlton said. The hallway leading to the auditorium and music classrooms was boarded off for weeks.
Charlton is just grateful that only school property was harmed by the storm.
“It would’ve been much more difficult if we had physical injuries, and we didn’t,” she said.
‘Tornado Kid,’ mom reflect on storm
Sharon Tubbs reflects on the tornado every year when March 23 rolls around.
Under a blue sky and sunshine, the Hempfield parent drove to the high school after work to pick up her oldest son, Ryan, from volleyball practice. Pulling into the parking lot, she saw other parents step out of their vehicles and gaze upward.
“They saw (the tornado) coming,” she said. “It just went from day to night, instantly.”
Some parents retreated into the high school to shelter with their children, she said. But Sharon Tubbs experienced the storm from her car.
“My Jeep was literally rocking back and forth. It was a crazy experience,” she said. “It was just wild to actually be in a tornado like that.”
She watched in awe as insulation, bricks and building materials flew through the air as if they were weightless.
“It felt like a movie,” she said. “It was really nuts.”
Charlton was about to leave the school for the day when she saw what she thought was a fire emerging behind the building. She got in her car and drove to the back of the school, unintentionally heading directly into the tornado.
Within seconds, it ripped the front bumper off of her car, she said. Strong winds circling past the track picked up a pole vault mat — weighing more than 1,000 pounds — and shoved it into the windshield of a parent’s car.
As the winds subsided, Charlton began checking on the students who were still at the high school for track and field practice and musical rehearsal.
“At that time, there were reports that there might be another tornado,” she said.
The track and field athletes made it safely to the fieldhouse, she said. But the drama club had sheltered under the auditorium stage, which sustained significant damage during the tornado.
Charlton helped them move to the fieldhouse until district officials were told students were safe to leave school property.
“Where they were in that immediate area under the stage, they were pretty well protected there,” she said. “But getting them out of there to a safe place was pretty crazy, because there was a lot of broken glass and general destruction. It was pretty frightening for them.”
The tornado passed by the high school in minutes, making a beeline for the Tubbs’ neighborhood. Sharon Tubbs called her 15-year-old son, who was already filming the storm on his iPod.
“I always say I’m so grateful that my voice wasn’t on the (video),” she said, “because I was losing my mind. I knew he was probably outside doing something like that.”
It was Tyler Tubbs’ natural instinct to record the tornado.
At the time, YouTube was becoming increasingly popular among his classmates, he said. And Apple had released its first iPod with a video camera just two years prior.
Tubbs discovered the storm while on a video call with his friend.
“As soon as I walked upstairs and looked (outside) is when I hit record,” he said.
The video, Tubbs said, does not do justice to the green hue in the sky.
“You could actually see a vortex going the whole way into the ground,” he said. “It was something I had never seen before.”
Tubbs stayed on his front porch to record the storm until he saw a tree ripped out of the ground. Within 10 minutes of the tornado’s departure from his neighborhood, Tubbs uploaded his footage to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and MySpace.
“That was just raw emotion,” he said. “I don’t even think that I played it back to see my reaction (before posting). I filmed it and put it out there and then played it back.”
By the time his mother and brother returned home, his phone was blowing up with texts, emails and phone calls about the video, which he submitted to The Weather Channel. It played on that night’s broadcast.
“For weeks later,” Sharon Tubbs said, “he was taking calls at 5 a.m. from Canada, from radio stations. Really all over the world, people were contacting him, trying to get his perspective.”
‘Our lives have changed a lot’
The media attention came at a pivotal time in her son’s life.
“I was 15 when it happened,” he said. “I feel like it was a really impressionable age. … That’s probably the first time you start thinking about ‘What do you want to do when you get older?’ ”
But the experience did not segue into a career in media or meteorology for Tubbs.
After graduating from Hempfield Area in 2014, he attended Pitt-Johnstown for a year before transferring to Westmoreland County Community College — where he received an associate degree in mechanical drafting and design in 2017.
He moved to Hagerstown where he met his wife, Tristen. The two married in 2022, living in North Carolina and Tubbs’ native Westmoreland County before moving back to Maryland.
Tubbs returns to Hempfield from time to time to visit his mother, Sharon, who has no plans to leave the Fort Allen home she has lived in for nearly 32 years.
“I love this area. It’s close to everything,” she said. “It’s a really nice area to raise kids.”
Fifteen years have made quite the difference in the Tubbs family, she said.
“Both of my sons are married with two kids. It’s unbelievable,” she said. “Our lives have changed a lot.”