Up the Alley

To meteorologists at the Severe Local Storms Forecasting Center in Kansas City, Mo., the signs were ominous. A turbulent low-pressure system was building up in eastern Kansas, creating the conditions that breed tornadoes. Out went the first of a series of warnings. But to thousands of citizens living in "Tornado Alley," a vast band of land extending about 400 miles on each side of a line from Fort Worth to Detroit, the warnings were old stuff, and therefore to be ignored.

Then the tornadoes came. In two days, 45 twisters tore through the Midwest, most of them following three distinct paths across portions of Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio. Capricious and unpredictable, they left 243 people dead, an estimated 5,000 injured, and countless others homeless, while the cost in property damage ran to more than $200 million.

Mushroom Stem. In Goshen, Ind., Elkhart County Sheriff Woody Caton heard about a tornado on his police radio at home. He ran for his car and drove toward a trailer park directly in the twister's path. He got there just after the tornado passed over. "God, what a sight!" he reported. "It was an unbelievable mess. Ninety-two trailers had been completely leveled. Another dozen were upended. Trailers were ripped from their frames, squashed and twisted. Some were tossed onto the highway. Everyone I saw was covered with blood. There wasn't a thing left of the paved sidewalks, trees or hedges. Power lines were down. It looked like a giant auto-crushing machine had simply chewed the place up. There were several people dead. So we stacked them over here and stacked them over there."

As the sheriff's rescue teams worked in the debris, another tornado whipped into sight. "It looked as if it was coming right for us," said Caton. "It looked very big. It didn't have that kind of corkscrew-type spiral. This one looked like the stem off the ugliest kind of mushroom I'd ever want to see." The tornado shifted course, and the sheriff jumped into his car to follow it. He arrived at a residential section about two miles away to see a nightmare of death and walking wounded amid a totally shattered landscape. "Trees were twisted and twisted again and then ripped in half," said Caton. "The tornadoes seared paint off cars, squeezed them together like accordions, or exploded them as if by dynamite."

Under the Overpass. The story was the same wherever the twisters struck. Near Toledo, Ohio, a tornado picked up one family's car and hurled it into a creek, killing two small boys and injuring their parents. A few yards away, it ripped the roof from a two-story house, leaving the occupants untouched. A truck driver tried to find shelter beneath an overpass, but the twister scooped him out and turned his truck over.

Along the Toledo-Detroit expressway, four people were killed and eight others injured when the bus in which they were riding was spun over onto its roof. The tornado charged into a small housing development, flattened 25 homes, killed six people.

In Grand Rapids, Mich., 56-year-old Earl Dove battened down his home, and started to move his family into the basement; the next thing he remembers is finding himself on a heap of splintered lumber, 50 ft. from the house. In Goldwater, Mich., a four-inch piece of straw flew like a steel-tipped arrow and imbedded itself in a woman's neck. In Strongsville, Ohio, near Cleveland, a baby was sucked out of a house and hurled to its death--still in its bassinet. The same vacuum pressure pulled the wedding ring from the finger of the baby's mother.

Floods. President Johnson, along with Congressmen who represent the stricken areas, flew to the Midwest to see the damage for himself. He walked through the debris, examined the destruction, talked to survivors, assured them that the Government would help them get back on their feet again. When he left, his face reflected the same anguish that he had seen in the eyes of the tornado victims.

As if it were not enough that the storms had wrought such suffering, people in cities and towns along the northern portion of the Mississippi River got ready for new troubles. Early last week the spring thaws from the north began sending countless tons of water hurtling down the river. Thousands of residents in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa evacuated their homes as the river rose as much as 12 ft. above flood stage; in St. Paul it crested at 27 ft., in Minneapolis at 21 ft. Parts of the region already were under water as townspeople rushed to the riverbanks to help man the levees. Red Cross stations were ready with food and first aid while the mighty river roiled and rose. And worse was expected to come.

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