SEEING IT COMING

Tornado forecasts can be challenging, but a new strategy shows promise.

- Joseph Taylor

At around 1:00 p.m. on Wednesday, March 18, 1925, a tornado formed above the woods in southern Missouri. A small but strong swirling funnel touched the ground, uprooting trees and sending them hurling through the air.

As the tornado sped northeast, it grew in size and speed and demolished the small town of Annapolis, leveling 78 houses. Next it slammed into the town of Biehle. There, a school with 25 students and their teacher was lifted up into the air and carried the length of several soccer fields. As the building splintered in midair, the kids and teacher were flung back to Earth. Somehow, each one of them survived.

The tornado grew darker, louder, bigger. People observed not a slender, fluffy white spiral but an enormous, near mile-wide black cloud. It sounded at moments like screaming freight trains and acted like a monstrous vacuum, sucking up and slinging debris of every imaginable sort: roofs of buildings, shards of glass, and entire cars and tractors. As it was traveling at more than 73 miles per hour (117 km/h) and producing winds of about 300 mph (483 km/h), no one could outrun it.

The Tri-State tornado, as it became known, sputtered to an end in southwest Indiana, three and a half hours after forming. By that time, it had traveled through three states, leaving 695 people dead and over 2,000 injured. Considered the deadliest single tornado in US history, the Tri-State tornado scarred the people of Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana and terrified the nation.

The Shape of Things