In the afternoon hours of April 3, 1974, a small but powerful tornado would move through three states, including Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana.

The tornado would continue to move through the city, injuring several people before lifting near White Oak at 4:53 pm CDT, after being on the ground for twenty-three minutes and tracking 21 mi (34 km).

The mid-latitude low-pressure center over Kansas continued to deepen to 980 mb (28.94 inHg), and wind speeds at the 850-mb level increased to 50 kn (58 mph) (25.7 m/s (93 km/h)) over portions of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Due to significant moisture advection, destabilization rapidly proceeded apace; the warm front near the Gulf Coast dissipated and then redeveloped northward over the Ohio River valley.

[1] Meanwhile, a large mesoscale convective system (MCS) that had developed overnight in Arkansas continued to strengthen due to strong environmental lapse rates.

At the same time, the forward-propagating MCS spread into the Tennessee and Ohio valleys, where it evolved into the first of three main convection bands that produced tornadoes.

The split was related to several factors, including a band of subsidence over eastern Kentucky and western West Virginia; local downslope winds over the Appalachians; and an inversion over the same area.

[2] Numerous surface-based supercells began to develop in the southern area, beginning with one that produced an F3 tornado at about 16:30 UTC near Cleveland, Tennessee.

[2] Several of the storms to form between 19:20 and 20:20 UTC became significant, long-lived supercells, producing many strong or violent tornadoes,[3] including three F5s at Depauw, Xenia, Ohio, and Brandenburg, Kentucky.

NWS surveyors noted that a pickup truck in this area was carried a half block over the roofs of five homes before being smashed to the ground.