Word: austine
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...clash with warm, wet Gulf weather. They know enough to find a ditch to lie in, or a sturdy, windowless room in the center of the house, preferably under a mattress or in a bathtub. And the citizens of Jarrell, a small town 42 miles up the interstate from Austin, did have time to take precautions. Meteorologists, concerned with the unseasonably high dew points (it has been a bumper wild-flower season) were broadcasting warnings. Tornado sirens went off at 3:55 p.m., 10 minutes before the winds hit. But for those in the path of this twister, all that...
...these high-tech times, ranchers had used cell phones to call in warnings to their families as others watched Doppler Radar reports on Austin and Waco television stations. Al Clawson, the owner of a small recycling plant, was at home when the tornado siren went off. "I seen the tornado on TV, and I called my wife and daughters at the plant and told them to get in their cars and run," he says. And run they did. The twister was a malignantly playful one, first appearing as a single funnel, drawing back and then suddenly combining at least three...
While Jarrell was the most disastrously affected, tornadoes struck a wide area from Waco to hill country south of Austin. Elsewhere, however, the destruction in the path of the storm, which led to three other deaths, seemed almost whimsical. The roof was ripped off a supermarket in Cedar Park, but when shoppers who had taken refuge in the freezer section emerged, they saw apples and melons still neatly stacked in the produce department. Dan Wachoub was barbecuing in his backyard when he saw what appeared to be black smoke behind his home. He went inside and called the fire department...
...only room left standing. Back in Jarrell, Ladonna Peterson, her son, niece and mother-in-law squeezed into a bathtub. "It got dark, black, and I saw the funnel cloud coming toward us. It was as big as a church and solid black," Peterson told the Austin American-Statesman. Family members clung to one another and sang Jesus Loves Me. The bathroom door flew open, debris covered them, and suddenly it was over. They climbed out to find everything gone, except the bathroom...
HILARY HYLTON, TIME's stringer in Austin, Texas, has been monitoring the activities of the group that calls itself the Republic of Texas for more than a year, interviewing its enigmatic leader, Rick McLaren, as his group grew more active, establishing, for example, a system of courts (one in an air-conditioning repair shop). When McLaren declared himself at war with the U.S. last week, we naturally turned to Hylton for the inside story. "He's a Pied Piper figure whose rhetoric is so confounding that you're tempted to dismiss him," says Hylton. "But it's evident that McLaren...