Word: tornadoes
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Hilde Graf was watching TV last week in her Wichita Falls, Texas, home when a tornado warning flashed on the screen. She rushed to a window and spotted a huge cloud darkening the horizon. With the twister bearing down at about 70 m.p.h., she jumped into her car and raced to the Sikes shopping mall, which she thought had a basement storm shelter. But there was no shelter at the mall, and Graf, along with hundreds of shoppers, cowered on the concrete floors of the mall's stores as the storm struck and merchandise and broken glass hurtled like...
...twister was part of the worst tornado system to hit Texas since 1953, when 114 people were killed in Waco. One evening last week, perhaps as many as ten funnels roared down the Red River Valley, along the border of Texas and Oklahoma. The corridor is known as Tornado Alley because its springtime atmospheric conditions-warm air from the Gulf collides with cold fronts from the north-make it ripe for spawning twisters...
Wichita Falls (pop. 100,000) was hardest hit by far. There three tornadoes joined together, creating a huge funnel with winds estimated at 225 m.p.h. It sucked up roofs, tore huge limbs from trees, and lifted the debris as high as half a mile into the sky. Said Roy Styles: "I crawled under a mattress, and that's all that saved me because the walls fell in." Cindy Trott, 22, fled to a science building at Midwestern State University for safety. Said she: "It didn't look like a tornado until it got up close to you. Then...
...anyone who has dealt with the Harvard bureaucracy knows, many a brainstorm has gone out to sea in a tornado of red tape. Jackson also knew that if he didn't do his homework in advance, administrators would view his "boxing extravaganza" as nothing more than an unfeasible pipe-dream. After all, intramural boxing at Harvard had been banned in the early 1970s...
...imaginary biology; the most eccentric and striking example of that genre being a pair of crude effigies of horses, made from sticks, chicken wire and mud by the California artist Deborah Butterfield. There is also a hilarious piece of funkiness by a Texas sculptor, James Surls, representing a tornado chewing through the roof of a church; Surls' debt to that master of buckeye surrealism, H.C. Westermann, is ob vious enough, but the image has a wobbly comic-strip blatancy about it that carries conviction...