Mayor Elect Tom Martin Remembers Killer Tornado

         Tom Martin won the mayoral race on Saturday, beating Incumbent Mayor David Miller by 21 percentage points.  On Friday, Martin will be sworn in as mayor, and he says he has big plans for the future.  Now, you may be interested to know Martin actually started his career in public service 38 years ago on Lubbock's darkest day.

"A week after the storm I started my job as public information officer for the city and we were in disaster mode for a good 6 months."  Mayor Elect Tom Martin says he actually accepted that job on May 11th,19-70.  The day an F5 twister roared through downtown Lubbock and headed toward the airport.  He says,"It was horrific. You just couldn't imagine it. It was like an atomic bomb had gone off."  The tornado killed 26 people and destroyed 2,800 homes, leaving thousands of families homeless.  Martin remembers, "There was just so much destruction in Lubbock, so many public facilities destroyed."  But, it ends up Lubbock was more prepared to handle a big emergency than nearly any other city in the country.   Martin says Lubbock was one of three cities in the US chosen by the Department of Defense in the mid 60's to test out the new concept of emergency preparedness.  He says, "Lubbock went through this exercise, trained and developed an Emergency Operation Center, and emergency plans, and all of it was completed in November, 1969 ... That was the key to Lubbock coping with this magnitude of disaster."  Martin and other city officials worked together to help Lubbock recover. "A lot of the efforts you see in downtown today, the Civic Center, the library project, the Canyon Lakes project, were all things that came out of the rebuilding efforts after the tornado."   Martin stayed in public service for the next 38 years.  He became a police officer, then a city council member, then Mayor Pro Tem, and in 2008, Mayor Elect.  He'll be sworn in as Lubbock's 33rd Mayor on Friday and he says in a sense he'll once again be helping lubbock rebuild!   "There's still a lot of work to do to redevelop and rebuild downtown Lubbock a lot of that has been talked about extensively in recent months and I expect to play a big part in that," Martin insists. "We have other areas of the city we want to redevelop and allow Lubbock to move forward so, we don't get into a throwaway mentality where we throw away parts of the city and go somewhere else."