Tornado Watch Number 211 Author:John G. Fuller Two years ago, on Friday, May 31, 1985, weather forecaster Steve Weiss was sitting at his desk inside the horseshoe formed by flickering computer terminals and radar screens at the National Severe Storms Forecast Center in Kansas City, Missouri. Meteorologists like Weiss are called "keepers of the gates of hell." They track mainly gale... more »s, hurricanes, and thunderstorms. But of all the savage storms they watch, tornadoes are considered the most lethal and unpredictable. Carried in the bellies of extremely intense thunderstorms called supercells, they scream down from towering cumulonimbus clouds, spitting out winds of immeasurable force that are capable of sucking up anything from the eyes of geese to loaded railway cars.
The weather that week had been freakish all across the nation. Snowstorms had hit Montana, Colorado, and Wyoming. Meanwhile, record heat had scorched Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. There had been 70 m.p.h. winds in Nebraska. Hail the size of baseballs had damaged two thousand new cars at the Ford plant in Kansas City. The stage was being set for a titanic collision of hot versus cold weather fronts.
Tornado Watch #211 is the minute-by-minute account of one of the most deadly natural disasters in the nation's history. It fills the reader with a sense of terrifying immediacy. From the very instant forecaster Weiss spotted the first alarming signs of danger and typed out his alert, Tornado Watch #211: Immediate broadcast requested...tornadoes...large hail...dangerous lightning possible..., until a short time later, when the actual disaster struck a series of picture-book towns along the Ohio-Pennsylvania border and into Canada, the reader follows the horrifying drama in moment-by-moment fashion.
In the aftermath of the tornadoes more than thirteen hundred houses has simply vanished. Thousands of people were dead, hurt, missing, homeless. Public buildings that remained standing were turned into morgues and crisis centers. But the survivors would not surrender to disaster or despair. Here is the story of their courageous efforts to rebuild their families, their homes, towns, communities. This is a story of nature at its worst and humankind at its best.« less