Word: twister
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Kansas City's twister, like all tornadoes, kicked out of a vicious thunderstorm. The U.S. Weather Bureau's radar showed it by early evening as the hooked tail on an egg-shaped thunderstorm blob moving northeastward across Kansas one day last week. At 6:30 p.m., as the Missouri city was settling down to supper, a storm-warning volunteer near Williamsburg, Kans., 70 miles southwest of the city, backstopped the radar. In the storm's ugly grey clouds, he telephoned, was a groping funnel. Ten minutes later, urged on by bulletins from three television and seven radio...
...trim houses (average price $12,000) boasted cellars. Worried parents herded children toward the nearest neighbor with a basement, and as many as 40 people huddled together in these rare dugouts. Not everyone heard the warnings, and not everyone who heard heeded them. By 7 p.m., when the twister swirled over the state line with a roar like a highballing freight train, the 16-store Ruskin Heights shopping center was dotted with evening shoppers. The tornado ripped a path 70 miles long, in some places ploughed a 1,000-yd. swath, splintered more than 700 homes and 40 stores. Ruskin...
...Palmer of Rugeley died a sportsman and a poisoner to his fingertips. On June 14, 1856, a crowd of 30,000 jostled and bargained for a good view of the scaffold outside Stafford Gaol, miners caroused in the taverns, and when Palmer died without a struggle, they cried, "Cheat! Twister!", for they had come to see him kick at the end of the rope. Britain's Robert Graves, poet, novelist, fabulist and all-round man of letters, has now issued a lively post-post-mortem report on the whole affair...
...scientist called "the best-documented tornado in history." As the whirling funnel gouged a path through the city from southeast to northwest, killing ten, injuring 200 and causing a $4,000,000 loss in smashed homes and businesses, radiomen tracked it closely in swift mobile units. Since the twister rarely moved faster than 20 m.p.h., they often sped in front of it, frequently beat police and disaster units to scenes of havoc. They gave thousands of homeward-bound motorists accurate reports on where the tornado was heading, warned of streets already clogged with mangled power lines and telephone poles...
...feet (leaving the motor running) to get pictures, never let it get more than 200 yds. away. Once he returned to his car to find it jammed with terrified survivors. Their terror grew when they realized, after refusing to get out, that Levy was trying to stay with the twister, not get away from it. "We're coming, Jesus!" some of them chanted. "We're coming!" Levy, who estimates that he has covered four tornadoes a year for 15 years, got some unforgettable footage, enabling NBC, in three successive news shows, to give millions of viewers a chilling...