Years before he became the county emergency services director, Steve Bicehouse was an eyewitness to the worst natural disaster in county history.

He was 14 years old 40 years ago when he and his sister were in the yard of their family’s home in Evans City. The next door neighbor came out and said she heard over her emergency scanner that a tornado was bearing down on them.

“I was young. I saw it come over the hill,” Bicehouse recalled. “We ran into the basement.”

The F3 tornado that struck that day, May 31, 1985, spared his family’s home, but left a trail of destruction across the southern half the county.

The tornado claimed the lives of six people, left dozens injured and forced at least 50 families from their damaged and destroyed homes.

Coroner John Look identified the dead as 13-month-old Dennis J. Armstrong, of KDKA Boulevard, Saxonburg; his babysitter Sherri Durci, 19, of 535 Freeport Road; Edward J. Fink, 64, of Evans City; Lorraine Fink, 51, of Evans City, according to a story in the June 1, 1985, edition of the Butler Eagle.

A tornado touched down along Knoch Road and KDKA Boulevard near Saxonburg and struck a mobile home where Durci was watching Armstrong. They were thrown a few hundred yards and died of their injuries.

John and Karen Bogus sought shelter in the basement of their two-story brick home on Knock Road near Saxonburg, but were killed when a stone wall fell on them. John was 44 and Karen was 41.

In Forward Township, Edward and Lorraine Fink died when the tornado ripped through their mobile home. Edward, 64, was found in the wreckage of the home while Lorraine, 51, was found 200 yards away.

The tempest was one of 43 tornadoes and damaging thunderstorms that tore across Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Ontario, Canada. It was the deadliest tornado outbreak of the 1980s, according to the National Weather Service.

The storms killed 89 people, injured more than 1,000 others and wreaked more than $600 million in property damage. Since that day, only two tornado days have been deadlier in the entire United States.

In Pennsylvania, 65 people died, making the disaster second only to the 1889 Johnstown Flood, which claimed 2,200 lives.

Bicehouse said his parents were at John’ Bar for dinner, and didn’t make it back home before the tornado blew in.

“They were frantic when they came home looking for me and my sister,” Bicehouse said.

He said his father told him he believed the bar would have imploded from the outside pressure caused by the tornado if someone hadn’t opened the door. His dad told him he saw a telephone pole fly past the bar, where Luck Dog’s Bar and Grill is now located.

Organizing the response and weekslong cleanup was the job of one of Bicehouse’s predecessors, Brad Magill.

“Everybody thought tornadoes in Pennsylvania, that doesn’t happen. We found out it does happen,” said Magill, who was 24 at the time.

The weather that day was warm and humid with a high chance of severe weather, and the first sign of trouble appeared on the National Weather Service radar around 4:30 p.m. when two tornadoes were detected in Ashtabula County, Ohio, just west of Erie.

By 5:30 p.m., two F4 tornadoes ripped through Erie County, an F5 tornado touched down in Wheatland, Mercer County, and storms were developing south in the Pittsburgh area.

An F3 developed in Beaver County traveled through Big Beaver and into Butler County around 7:35 p.m.

“Butler County and Beaver (County) were on high alert for a tornado. Venango (County) got hit harder than Butler County. All the way up to Erie got hit much worse than Butler,” Magill said.

Unlike Butler County, Venango County did not have an emergency dispatch system, he said.

“We started getting calls from Venango. They had been devastated by tornadoes. I called Vern (Smith) and said they need ambulances, but we were under a tornado watch and couldn’t send all of our ambulances. We asked a couple to go, then others decided to go even though I asked them to stay. Then the tornado hit Evans City and they turned around and came back,” Magill said.

Smith, the administrative director of emergency response for Butler Memorial Hospital and the county’s emergency medical service coordinator, said his job on June 1 was to drive around the impact areas and assess the injured.

People who suffered major injuries had already been taken for treatment. The people he saw had minor injuries.

“There was tremendous amount of patients that were in shock,” Smith said.

A memory Smith said is etched in his mind is of an elderly widowed farmer whose home on Browns Hill Road in Forward Township had been lifted from its foundation and left lying on its side.

“This farmer was calm, but in a state of shock. He kept saying ‘my girls slept through it.’ You look at the house sitting on its side, you wonder how anyone could sleep through it,” Smith said.

To go inside to check on the girls, he said he had to walk sideways to get up the steps to the second floor because the steps were laying down.

“He said ‘be quiet. They’re sleeping.’ I saw two porcelain dolls laying on the bed with covers up to their shoulders,” Smith said. “I was expecting to see dead kids. He swore they were his children and they were fine. He was in a severe state of shock.”

Evans City Volunteer Fire Department chief Jim Daugherty established an emergency operations center at the fire station that remained in service for three weeks while he and assistant chief Bob Young ran the recovery and clean up effort in that area of the county. Countless volunteers assisted, he said.

“For about a week we had someone at the station 24 hours a day,” Daugherty, 78, said. “I was incident commander. I was in overall command. Bob was operations officer. We made decisions based on needs.”

He said the fire department’s ladies auxiliary cooked meals upstairs in the social hall and took the food to people who needed it.

The Red Cross set up its headquarters in the fire hall, but relocated to the Evans City Elementary School, he said. The auxiliary let the Red Cross take over the food cooking and delivery effort, and the school became a drop off center for donated clothes.

Allegheny County’s emergency management department provided 55-gallon drums that were filled with water at the fire station and taken to people whose wells didn’t work because the electricity was out, Daugherty said.

Allegheny County crews cleared fallen trees and scatter debris from roads, driveways and streams.

“That was big relief. We were all exhausted,” Daugherty said.

Vogel Disposal provided dumpsters for the debris and sent trucks around to empty them for about a week after the tornado, he said.

The National Guard responded by using a helicopter to assess damage and by temporarily closing Mars Evans City Road due to concerns about looting, Daugherty said.

“It was a hectic time. Fortunately we had people jump in and help us. We ran that command center for three weeks,” he said.

It took months to clean up all the debris, but 70% to 75% was cleaned up in three weeks, he said.

Young said he was at the fire station May 31, 1985, when he heard on the radio a tornado was spotted in Beaver County.

“I looked outside and saw it coming,” Young said.

But he said the power went out when he began reporting what he saw and the radio went dead.

The volunteer clean up effort was awe inspiring, he said.

“It was the community that was volunteering and helping clear and helping feed,” Young said. “We had lists of volunteers — electricians, plumbers with their phone numbers, we would connect them to those who needed help. People donated money. Money poured out from the community.”

He divided the impacted areas into grids and assigned fire departments to each grid. The fire departments would then call the emergency operations center to report what supplies or services were needed.

One of the effects from the tornado that stand out in his memory include a cement mixer that flew 30 miles from Beaver County and landed on the roof of a house on Glenwood Avenue in Forward Township.

“In Jackson Township a herd of cows got sucked away,” Young said.

Some were found, both alive and dead, in other areas, he said, but some were never found.

He said emergency officials from Mercer and Crawford counties were pleading for help when tornadoes struck there about an hour before Evans City was struck.

A week into the clean up effort, Magill moved the county emergency services command center to the Evans City fire station and he worked side-by-side with Daugherty and Young.

He said he reached out to the Allegheny County road department for help and the department sent at least 30 trucks and workers with chain saws who cleared Watters Station Road, which was inaccessible due to debris from the storm.

A TV station in Pittsburgh organized numerous busloads of volunteers to come on weekends to help with the clean up, Magill said. The Red Cross fed all the volunteers, he added.