With the advent of weather radar in the late 1940s, meteorologists gained the ability to assess in real time the altitude, direction, intensity and speed of approaching storms. This breakthrough brought an entirely new level of sophistication to severe storm prediction. Nor was it just thunderstorms that could be seen on radar. Almost by accident, the technology was shown to be effective for detecting tornadoes. On April 9, 1953, electrical engineer Donald Staggs of the Illinois State Water Survey in Champaign was operating an APS-15A radar set originally designed for use aboard U.S. Navy aircraft. Staggs was preparing for an upcoming test designed to determine if the unit could measure rainfall amounts.
As it happened, a severe thunderstorm was passing about 25 miles to the north of Champaign. Staggs watched and took photographs as a curious, hook-shaped echo formed on the back edge of the storm’s radar signature. He subsequently learned that a tornado had touched down and followed the same path the hook had taken across his radar screen.
Researchers at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (later Texas A&M) confirmed the validity of the hook echo later that spring, and a highly effective statewide radar network was set up across Texas in 1955 to provide early warning of tornadoes. By the late 1950s, radar operators nationwide were being trained to identify the distinctive radar signature, which was formed by radio waves bouncing off the rain, hail, dirt and debris wrapping around the twister. The Weather Bureau soon decided that the presence of a hook echo was evidence enough to issue a tornado warning.
In the Topeka radar room, Odell, Brokaw and Eland watched as amorphous shapes of green light began to appear and grow in size and intensity with each sweep of the beam. The center of the low-pressure system was approaching Junction City, about 80 miles west of Topeka, and storms were beginning to pop up ahead of the low. Shortly after 3:00 p.m., the bureau office in Concordia received a report of a tornado on the ground west of Alden, Kansas. A tornado warning for Ellsworth, Saline and McPherson counties in the central part of the state was issued a few minutes later.
Very quickly, a squall line of thunderstorms formed literally out of thin air across a wide area of central Kansas and began advancing steadily eastward. In Topeka, the warm front that slowly had been working its way north finally rolled in at about 4:30 p.m. The sun broke through and burned away the last of the overcast, and the warm, damp air bottled up behind the front cascaded into the city. The day quickly became oppressive and would grow more so. Because layers of even warmer air had moved in aloft, the air near the surface was trapped and unable to rise. The temperature climbed to 75 degrees, and the air became increasingly unstable in the heat of the afternoon sun. From a meteorological perspective, the atmosphere near the ground was akin to gasoline vapor.
By 5:30 p.m., Eland and his team had their hands full. Storms were popping up all over northeastern Kansas. One particularly large thunderstorm, 20 miles in diameter, was reported moving northeast at 5:45 p.m. toward Wakefield, just west of Fort Riley and about 90 miles from Topeka. The storm already had a history of producing tornadoes, and Eland quickly typed out a warning for the area in the path of the storm, which included the city of Manhattan.
In Topeka, storm clouds were starting to gather in the southwest as machinist John Meinholdt left his father’s welding shop in North Topeka. Meinholdt, 32, was married, the father of two and a member of VEST, the volunteer CB spotter’s organization. His wife, Jean, was the group’s dispatcher. The CB radio under his dashboard crackled and Jean’s voice came on. She told her husband that all of the group’s spotting points south and west of the city had been manned save one: a prominent hill on the southwest edge of town known as Burnett’s Mound.
“10-4. I’ll take it. I’ll check in when I get there. Out.”
Meinholdt made a U-turn in his Ford Falcon Ranchero pickup on Topeka Boulevard and headed south. He’d deployed as a spotter dozens of times since VEST was formed nearly 10 years before. Generally, you took up a position, monitored the clouds, reported the information and stayed at your post until the danger had passed. Sometimes, it would be as late as midnight. Nine times out of 10, the storms would roll through without producing a tornado. And tonight probably would be no different.
But this particular situation was going downhill fast. New reports were coming in to the Weather Bureau office; a tornado had spun out of the Wakefield storm and apparently struck Manhattan just before 6:00 p.m., causing extensive damage both to residences and to the Kansas State University campus. No report on casualties. In the radar room, Odell and Brokaw watched a blob of light southwest of Topeka grow larger with each radar pass. Another storm was forming along the boundary of the warm front and the low-pressure system, this one much closer to the city.
The sun was still out, though, as 10-year-old Teri Huffman and her 12-year-old sister, Tami, reveled in the late-afternoon light with the other kids on the block, yelling, chanting, jumping rope and playing hopscotch. The Huffmans lived on Southwest 30th Street, just south of the busy intersection of 29th Street and Gage Boulevard and not far from the high hill known as Burnett’s Mound. The Huffmans’ three-bedroom, slab home was in a new subdivision called County Fair Estates. Tami, the older girl, was tall and gangly with curly hair. Her sister, Teri, was impish. She had a little bob haircut and looked just like Scout from the movie To Kill a Mockingbird.
A friend’s mother cupped her hands and yelled from the front stoop to the children playing in the quiet street. “Teri and Tami! Your mother called! She wants you to come home right now!”
The girls looked at each other incredulously, then slowly turned and trudged up the block. Their mother was waiting in the yard.
“You kids come inside,” Joanna said curtly.
“But, Mom! Everyone else is still playing! Why do we have to! It won’t be dark for a while!”
“Never you mind. Just come in the house. We’ll eat in a few minutes.”
“Oh, Mom . . .”
The girls slunk into the house, resigned to their fate, but then brightened at the prospect of watching Batman after dinner.
It had been a strange day for Joanna Huffman. All afternoon, the 32-year-old homemaker had felt an emotion — if that’s what you want to call it — that she’d never experienced before. It was an odd, unsettling sensation that something wasn’t right. The feeling was powerful, disturbing and constant in the pit of her stomach. Years later, the only way she could describe it was as a sense of impending doom. It had nothing to do with the tornado watch, as far as she knew. You had those all the time in Kansas. And in any event, the sun was out and the wind was still. It had nothing to do with anything at all. It was just a feeling. But at least her husband, Harold, had arrived home from Goodyear, where he worked as a computer analyst. And the kids were in the house. So Joanna shook off the nameless dread and began to prepare dinner.
It’s odd, though, how premonitions can present themselves. Across town, Kathryn Cushinberry was still pondering something she’d heard three days before. Kathryn had been in church that Sunday with her husband, Grant, and their four children. The family attended Lane Chapel on Harrison Street. The church was part of the Colored Methodist Episcopal denomination, a branch of Methodism launched by freed slaves after the Civil War. More than 150 people were in the chapel as Rev. J. P. Turner stepped up to deliver his sermon.
Turner was a tall man in his 40s. He stood behind the pulpit and pointed toward the assembled group. Then he swept his finger across the entire congregation, moving steadily from one side of the sanctuary to the other, saying not a word. He did not blink and seemed to lock eyes with every man, woman and child in the church. Then he spoke. His voice was deep and his elocution commanding and precise.
“Hear me now . . .
“You’d better make ready.
“You’d better fast.
“Something drastic is coming!”
There was a rustle in the church as people cast puzzled, sidelong glances at one another or shifted nervously in their
seats. Turner said no more about the matter. But his words haunted Kathryn. What in the world was he talking about? What could be coming? Plus, she had a more practical question:
How long are we supposed to fast?
From the southwest, low, boiling clouds moved in over the city. The sun was quickly obscured, although enough diffuse light filtered through to paint the sky an unnatural, yellowish green. At the surface, the air was dead calm. As thunder clapped and growled in the distance, Topeka suddenly seemed caught in a strange netherworld between light and darkness. Across the city, people stopped to gaze up at the spectacle. To 13-year-old Irma Hillebert, standing on the campus of Washburn University, the sky looked completely unnatural, like the atmosphere of a distant planet. The air itself seemed to crackle with potential energy.
John Meinholdt turned off Topeka Boulevard and flogged the little Ranchero as he pulled onto I-470. He could see the purple-black mass of a storm in the distance, beyond Burnett’s Mound. A minute or two later, he swung off the interstate at the Gage exit, descended the ramp and turned left on Gage Boulevard beneath the underpass. Gage followed the center of a shallow valley that stretched from the Shunganunga (pronounced “Shun-Ga-Nun-Ga”) Creek to the base of Burnett’s Mound. Across Gage to the west of the ramp were the pastel homes of the County Fair Estates subdivision, crowded between the interstate and 29th Street a quarter mile to the north. On the other side of Gage, to the right of the ramp, was a Texaco service station and small strip mall with a 7-Eleven, a liquor store and a dry cleaner. A little further east were the sprawling Embassy Apartments. The complex encompassed three separate buildings — the Embassy, the Huntington and the El Dorado. The Embassy and the Huntington were square, two-story buildings with long interior balconies centered on an open courtyard and pool. They housed some of the newest and most luxurious apartments in town, and the entire compound stretched from the interstate nearly to 29th Street. Beyond the apartments to the east, new homes of the Prairie Vista subdivision stair-stepped up a long, low ridge that paralleled the valley.
Meinholdt emerged from the underpass on the south side of the interstate. To his right, Burnett’s Mound formed the head of a hogback ridge that sloped back and down and away to the south. Thus, the ideal spot for observing weather moving in from the southwest was not on the mound’s summit but at the southernmost edge of the ridge, four-tenths of a mile south of the mound proper. Thirty-fifth Street headed straight up the shoulder of the ridge beyond the overpass. Then a switchback gravel road split off to follow the contours of the hill to the saddle. Meinholdt downshifted as he swung the Ranchero onto the switchback. At the top, he radioed that a major storm was approaching from the southwest at a bearing of 210–260 degrees.
Dave Perkins, a VEST radio volunteer stationed at the Weather Bureau office, relayed Meinholdt’s message to Eland and his staff. At 6:50 p.m., Eland pounded out a bulletin on the weather wire:
HEAVY THUNDERSTORMS ARE MOVING INTO THE WESTERN EDGE OF THE TOPEKA AREA. THESE THUNDERSTORMS WILL LIKELY CONTAIN HARD RAIN, WHICH WILL AFFECT HIGHWAY TRAVEL. THE STRONGER CELLS WILL POSSIBLY PRODUCE HAIL AND MAY CONTAIN QUITE STRONG WINDS. GUSTS TO 80 MPH WERE RECORDED IN THE MANHATTAN AREA AS THE THUNDERSTORMS MOVED EASTWARD DOWN THE KANSAS RIVER VALLEY. A PILOT REPORTED A POSSIBLE FUNNEL CLOUD 8 MILES EAST OF MANHATTAN MOVING EAST AT 6:17 PM CST.
Near the small town of Dover, 20 miles to the southwest, Lester Osburn was watching the sky. The worst of the rain had passed his farm, and although a little pea-size hail was still falling, the sky was beginning to clear. Then Osburn watched as two air masses, each marked by roiling black clouds — one from the southwest and one from the northwest — seemed to collide just to the east. From the ensuing turbulence, a slender white funnel emerged. A second funnel appeared moments later, also white and very near the first. After a few minutes, the two merged into a much larger, still-white twister and dropped hard to the ground. Osburn later recalled that the clouds above the tornado were “boiling like an A-bomb mushroom.” He dashed to the phone, reached the emergency operator and reported a tornado on the ground 4 miles south of Dover, moving northeast toward Topeka.
The sun was shining brightly in the west.
CHAPTER THREE
Facing the Monsters
As the roar drew closer, Inge Nicely shut her eyes and squeezed Angie tighter in the cramped, musky darkness of the crawl space. The sound wasn’t like a freight train. It was like a thousand freight trains, and in a moment, every one of them was right overhead. Inge squeezed Angie so hard, it occurred to her later that she could have suffocated her daughter. Then the sound finally began to abate. Three or four minutes had passed since Glenn Nicely shoved his wife and daughter into the crawl space at Glenn’s mother’s house. When the noise finally stopped and Inge opened her eyes, she could see that Angie was okay. But blue sky was visible through the crawl space opening. The house and garage were gone.
Inge set her daughter aside and cautiously pulled herself out through the hole. Only one kitchen wall stood. No sign of her husband or mother-in-law. She stood up. Angie started climbing out behind her, but Inge instinctively pushed the little girl back. Then she heard a guttural scream. She stepped toward it, across one of the shattered garage doors, which now lay where the kitchen had been. Glenn’s voice was muffled under the rubble. “You’re stepping on me! Get off! Get off! Get me out of here!” He was buried beneath the door and limestone rocks from the collapsed chimney. Inge tried to lift the stones but could not.
She immediately noticed a pervasive stench, a fetid blend of the many substances the tornado had gathered on its journey so far: mud, grass, pond water, manure, slaughtered animals, wood, soaked Sheetrock, food.
Inge gagged and looked around. Glenn’s mother lay a dozen feet north of the garage. She was perfectly encased in concrete blocks, almost as if the wind had carefully erected a low protective wall around her. A heavy, old, hand-crank washing machine had ended up on top of the blocks, and Inge, all 110 pounds of her, somehow managed to throw it aside. Mrs. Nicely was conscious, her eyes wide open. She lay on her back. Her curlers were dusted with hundreds of tiny shards of glass and they glittered like diamonds in the slanting rays of the afternoon sun. She said her hip hurt when she tried to move. And there was a strange, half-inch-deep crease that ran nearly the length of her lower leg. Whatever struck her didn’t break the skin. But it must have hit hard to leave a dent like that.
The silence was so profound, Inge thought for a moment that perhaps she’d gone deaf. No birds sang. Not a leaf rustled, for there were no more leaves or branches or trees. Glenn yelled again. And then, from somewhere deep in the rubble, the telephone rang. How could it be? Inge made a halfhearted attempt to find the phone but could not.
Behind the house, where Glenn and Inge’s house trailer had been, only the trailer’s chassis remained. Inge immediately thought of Tommy, the Siamese cat, and Mitzi, her beloved little dog. They were last seen inside the trailer — current whereabouts, God only knew. But undoubtedly dead. Up Auburn Road, 100 yards to the north, rubble from the neighbors’ house — the Wolfs — was blasted across the highway as if shot from a cannon. In the Nicelys’ yard, the mighty pines were gone and a smaller tree nearby had snapped off about six feet up. Glenn’s sister’s car was skewered on the tree’s sharpened spike, right side up, like an olive on a toothpick.
Everything was dreamlike. People were running up and yelling.
“Are you folks okay?”
The man from Maine and his friend who’d watched the tornado pass before them were among the first up the drive. “The horses! You should have seen it! The tornado lifted ’em right over the road! I think they’re okay, though! They just set down and took off!”
The strangers quickly pulled Glenn from the rubble. The hot water heater had ruptured and scalded his face. Glass from the garage door windows had peppered his back and his arms were cut and bleeding. But he could stand and he was walking. A few minutes later, Glenn’s father pulled up in his
station wagon. The men carefully placed Mrs. Nicely on a door and loaded her into the back of the wagon. Glenn and Inge and Angie climbed in. The family took off for the hospital in town.
For sheer, concentrated violence, nothing in nature comes close to a tornado. Severe thunderstorms can pack damaging, straight-line winds in excess of 100 miles an hour. Hurricanes must top 155 miles an hour to achieve Category 5 status, the most severe designation. But the wind speeds of the nastiest tornadoes can be more than twice that.1 Worse, tornadoes possess a kinetic arsenal seemingly designed solely for wreaking havoc along the surface of the Earth. The tornado’s spinning vortex creates torque, which exerts a violent pushing, pulling and twisting motion in a way that straight winds cannot. Hence, the bony fingers of a tornado can easily enter and explode houses; pry apart anchored or attached wood and steel; and roll, toss or twist cars and other heavy objects.
Compounding this circular, buzz-saw effect is the surging updraft at the center of the vortex. Because of the enormous suction produced by the updraft, surface air rushes to meet the twister like water racing down the drain. This air is pulled up through the tornado in a spiraling, geyserlike column. The updraft, which can be accelerating vertically at 100 miles an hour or more, grabs objects torn lose by the rotational winds and propels them aloft. Here they essentially become weightless for periods of time as they bounce along inside the updraft or slide outward into the spinning column.
This debris provides the storms with yet another weapon: Much of the material caught in the vortex eventually flies out of the tornado like gravel shot from a spinning tire. The centrifugal force accelerates objects, turning two-by-fours, nails, glass, telephone poles, tree limbs, chunks of concrete, steel beams and automobiles into deadly missiles. The result is a hammering, 360-degree barrage of shrapnel firing from the tornado and extending the storm’s destructive reach well beyond the immediate path of the twister.
And Hell Followed With It: Life and Death in a Kansas Tornado Page 5
