Storm Warning : The Story of a Killer Tornado

by Nancy Mathis

• ISBN13: 9780743280532
• ISBN10: 0743280539
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-03-06
• Publisher: Touchstone

Summary

The Perfect Storm on the prairie, Storm Warning is a compulsively readable account of one of the most terrible tornadoes in history -- and the extraordinary people who kept it from becoming the deadliest.

May 3, 1999, is a day that Okla

Table of Contents

Introduction

Nature's Atom Bomb

A Meteorological Star

A Tornado Forecast

Searching For Clues

The Tornado Detective

Priority One

Hiding From The Bear

Inside The Bear's Cage

Mr. Tornado Sees His First

A Twister's Journey

Vortex

The Twister's Aftermath

Seeing The Winds

A Tornado's Grip

Acknowledgments

Notes

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Nature's Atom Bomb Before the greenish radar scans, before blurry photographs from satellites, before television or television meteorologists, and before the snappy twenty-four-hour-a-day Weather Channel, there was this: the faint flicker of lightning and the distant growl of thunder on the prairie's horizon. This was what amounted to a storm warning on the plains. The far, open sky filled with mountainous cauliflower clouds that grew fat with rain and hail, and those dark olive-hued clouds could conceal the most powerful force known in nature -- or not. No one knew for sure, no mere mortal could; after all, the tornado, or cyclone as it was called on the plains, was an act of God, an Old Testament punishment for ill deeds or a test of faith. It was capricious and deadly, leaving the living to bear witness that the great wind came straight from heaven, or so it seemed. April 9, 1947, sometimes seems like yesterday for Ramona Kolander. Not that she dwells on the day, but it's impossible to forget a day that turns your life upside down. Not even a day really, just a few seconds, and a life's course is altered forever. "I never would have lived the life I lived without that tornado," she explained. It served as the demarcation in her life, the before and the after. Ramona was a senior at Shattuck High School at the time. Shattuck was a frontier town in far northwestern Oklahoma, situated at the edge of no-man's-land and the Texas border. It was flat and empty, and the emerald fields that bowed with the winds would soon turn golden as harvesttime approached. The Kolanders, like most of their neighbors, grew winter wheat, a difficult, fickle, and occasionally profitable occupation. For Ramona, most of the day was unremarkable, passing pretty much as it had for the past eighteen years of her life. She remembered the morning as a little cloudy, cool, and damp. She rose at daybreak, dressed, had breakfast, and helped her little sister, LaNita, get ready for school, a monotonous routine that was about to change with her upcoming graduation. She expected she would get a job, probably marry, raise her own kids, and live her life in Shattuck, just as her parents had. Three Kolander children -- Ramona, Floyd, and LaNita -- caught the yellow school bus for Shattuck. The baby of the family, four-year-old Doug, stayed at home. The school day became lost to memory, but surely there was some excitement as the class of '47 prepared for its dances, its final tests, and its ceremonies that would send them off into a confident postwar America. The Kolander siblings returned home at 5:00 p.m. Ramona stepped off the school bus and caught a glimpse of a "strange green hue" on the western horizon. She thought little of it. In Oklahoma in the spring, the weather could be unpredictable. The wind blustered harder than usual. A musty odor, a mixture of rain and dust, rode on the air. The Kolanders lived a few miles outside Shattuck in a white two-story house, a patchwork of adobe and wood frame. There was no electricity. They owned a battery-powered radio but used it sparingly. A giant water tank behind the home provided the family with its drinking water. And, of course, there was a windmill, its sullen metal vanes protesting at every turn with every gust. There was always a breeze on the prairie. The wind really did come sweeping down the plains as Rogers and Hammerstein wrote in their 1943 musicalOklahoma!The inland plains, a great swath of smooth lowlands, etched its way from Canada to North Texas and through much of Oklahoma. The state was a study in topographical transitions. To the east, along the border with Arkansas and the Ozarks, the terrain was hilly, green, and forested. Moving westward, the land rolled gently, and the trees, mainly oaks, grew smaller and sparser. In central Oklahoma, the ground flattened and tilted imperceptibly toward the Rocky Mountains 700 miles farther