Word: tornadoes
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...worst storms on earth are tornadoes, and most tornadoes hit the U.S.: 5,204 in 35 years (1916-50), killing 7,961 people and causing $476 mil lion in damages. History's worst, the Tri-State tornado of 1925, killed 689 people in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. A single storm front can create several tornadoes, each whirling furiously for a few fearsome miles. Sometimes the roaring black vortex stays harmlessly in the sky; when it dips to earth, the impact can dig a crater...
Last week such tornado conditions prevailed in places across the U.S. from Amarillo, Texas, to Buffalo, N.Y. In three days, a record total of no tornadoes was reported in Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa. Many were harmless, but one knocked a giant B-36 bomber out of the sky near Sterling, Texas, killing the 15-man crew. The worst killer slammed into Blackwell, Okla. and smashed across the Kansas line to Udall, 25 miles south of Wichita...
...resident. At 9:23 p.m. Pearl Joyce Peckham was standing on her front porch while a boy friend picked up hailstones rattling down from the dark sky. "The next thing I knew," she related, "he ran and grabbed me and said, 'My God, it's a tornado.' and there it was, right on top of us. It was dark, but this thing was much darker than the night. We ran into the house and got down on the floor and prayed." At the big $500,000 Hazel-Atlas Glass plant a night-shift worker heard "that awful...
...tornado, sixth and worst in Blackwell since 1912, destroyed and damaged 500 houses, hurt 493 people and killed 19, caused a $10 million loss. The whirlwind ripped surfaces off the highways, wrapped a big electric refrigerator around a tree stump, tossed a wrecked pickup truck onto the second floor of a ruined brick house. Sweeping north across the amber wheat, the deadly funnel killed one family's five children in Oxford, Kans. A farmer three miles south of Udall saw it coming: "It sounded like a bunch of jets and looked black as an oil slush pond. I didn...
...home in Udall, Lester Sweet turned on his TV set to catch the weather report: tornado warnings had been broadcast all day, and he was "deathly afraid." He heard an all-clear at 10:20 p.m. and was just settling into bed when the house cracked open. "We're in for it," he yelled to the wife, pushing her and the children under the bed. "We could hardly breathe with the vacuum and the dust," he said later. "It was like being in an echo box, with everybody yelling so loud you couldn't hear...