Word: tornado
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...tornado that hit Greensburg on May 4 took its time, rolling up Main Street like it was on a Sunday walk to church. Ron Shank, the owner of the Kansas town's only General Motors dealership, hid with his wife beneath a quilt in the basement, but they heard the storm rip their home from its foundations. Marvin George, a pastor at the Baptist church, sheltered in his closet. "We just knelt and prayed," he says. "I wasn't scared until the next morning, when I saw the carnage...
...tornado had measured EF5 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, the highest possible rating, and it left hardly a single wall standing. "I could only think of Hiroshima," remembers Lonnie McCollum, then the town's mayor. "Big strong men looked at what was left and were damn near in tears." Over 1,000 people - more than two-thirds of the town's population - were left homeless. Despite the help that poured in over the following weeks from FEMA, from charities and from nearby towns, residents feared their town had suffered a deathblow. Like many rural Midwestern towns, Greensburg had been losing...
...Still, green or not, for some Greensburg will never heal. Former mayor Lonnie McCollum, one of the first to raise the idea of building green, quit his post three weeks after the tornado, citing exhaustion, and eventually moved with his wife to the neighboring town of Pratt. On recent Friday, McCollum spoke wistfully of the town in which he had lived his entire life. He can't let Greensburg go, but he can't return, either. "We had a Norman Rockwell existence," the 62-year-old says. "For me, it's completely gone. There's nothing out there...
Will Ferrell's cocky, bimbo-loving character Chazz (an "ice-devouring tornado of sex") in the figure-skating spoof Blades of Glory would have found a soulmate in Christopher Bowman, a star of the sport in the 1980s and '90s. "Bowman the Showman," a former child actor, improvised routines at the last minute, winked at the cameras and flirted with female fans. He won the men's nationals in 1989 and '92, but his fights with coaches and off-rink habits?drinking, cocaine, women?began to overshadow his talent. At the time of his death from unknown causes...
...sheer arrogance of the article about California's fires was astounding. So we should not live in fire-prone areas? Perhaps people in New England shouldn't live in snow-prone areas, people in the Midwest shouldn't live in tornado-prone areas, and people in the Southeast shouldn't live in hurricane-prone areas. Storms in other parts of the U.S. cause far more deaths, injuries and economic losses every year than the relatively infrequent major fires in California do. Perhaps you can suggest a spot on the planet where we can all live free of risk. Joseph Leaser...