From Part One: Woodward, 1947
Chapter One: First Strike
It all began unremarkably enough, on a spring day in 1947. A cold, dry air mass was born, probably over the ice-caked reaches of Siberia. The air mass was huge, but blocked from moving by a high-pressure "dam" of air. Before long, the dam crumbled. The liberated blob of chilly air set sail on prevailing winds over the Pacific Ocean toward the western coast of the United States. Little did anyone know, hell would soon arrive with the Siberian Express.
Sprawling over hundreds of thousands of square miles, it crossed into California. On its leading edge swirled a weak low-pressure system. In this low -- which covered an area larger than Arizona -- wind and clouds spiraled in a counterclockwise flow toward the center, like water circling an emptying bathtub drain. The cold air mass and low-pressure region didn't linger very long. A high-altitude jet stream hurried them eastward.
Their passage did not go unnoticed. A 30-mile-an-hour breeze whistled through telephone lines in one southern California town that had been almost calm just 24 hours earlier. Near the center of the low, thunderstorms sprouted in southwestern Utah. Government meteorologists who consulted their finely detailed, coded weather maps could see that the system was swiftly marching across the country. Moreover, highs usher in clear blue skies, but lows stir up storms. They knew they had a troublemaker on their hands.
Unsettled weather certainly looked likely in the Texas Panhandle. The Siberian Express shoving in from the west was about to collide with a body of warm, moist air coursing up from the Gulf of Mexico. If the cold air mass proved to be a match, here was the dynamite. Yet the official forecast for April 9, 1947, for northwestern Oklahoma (which borders on the Texas Panhandle) hardly suggested a dangerous situation shaping up. In retrospect its blandness seems eerie: "Showers and thunderstorms with moderate to heavy amounts of rain this afternoon, tonight and Thursday . . . mild temperatures, low tonight 48-55."
Just after midnight on April 9, the Panhandle city of Amarillo reported overcast skies and a temperature of 50 degrees. As the day wore on, the two bodies of greatly contrasting air -- one cold and dry, the other warm and moist -- converged from their different directions. In what seemed to the untrained eye like a promising development, the sun broke through the cloud-filled Amarillo sky. The heat warmed spiny yuccas and twisted junipers, but also destabilized the blanket of moist air bottled up near the ground. By late afternoon, it was simmering dangerously. The pressure-cooker instability wouldn't last long. The atmosphere was getting ready to pop.
It did, in piles of cloud that lunged vertically before being tilted and knocked flat by high upper winds. Each failure served a purpose. Clouds grow better in wet environments, so succeeding towers were able to make better headway. At last the meddling wind lost in dramatic fashion. Thick, creamy-white columns jetted up. They bubbled and foamed, burgeoning like some kind of runaway nuclear fission.
A giant cloud formed. It reached great heights, up into the distant stratosphere. Off its crown spread downstream an anvil, a flat deck of ice crystals flung out by intense winds. The storm, a good ten miles deep, threw the plains into sudden darkness like a moving eclipse. And the movement was unmistakable, a brisk 40 miles an hour to the northeast.
From a distance this simple confection of water and air looked as solid as an island sculpted from marble. Closer in the illusion dissolved. The cloud was evolving and mutating with dizzying speed. It was actually a rapidly changing weather factory. Lightning flashed, then thunder rolled through gypsum canyons below. Raindrops formed and fell in waves.
The central trunk underwent the most startling transformation. Once sprawling and disorganized, it became smooth and tight, like something run through a cosmic lathe. The wide updraft of air feeding this floating giant wasn't only streaking upwards. It was turning in steady revolutions. The storm was twisting around itself.
Near Amarillo appeared another surprise. An odd-looking protuberance lowered below the low, dark base. It was a rotating collar of cloud that resembled a wheel or flaring suction mouth. A curious sort of activity then commenced. Just below the wheel, cloud tags seemed to snatch at each other, clumping together. At first this looked like harmless atmospheric prankishness, then something sinister took form. A funnel was sliding out of the sky.
Dirt spiked up when it touched the ground. It raced off beside railroad tracks that ran northeast, and headed on a beeline toward White Deer. The tornado did not travel very long alone, unobserved. It slipped behind a 61-car Santa Fe Railway freight train that was leisurely chugging into White Deer to pick up more empty cars. At a quarter of six, their paths crossed unforgettably.
When the caboose darkened, the curious conductor went toward the rear platform to look out. The floor beneath his feet shifted. The tornado had seized his train. It jerked up the steel cars and jackknifed them together like flimsy toys. Brake lines snapped and bunks, stoves, chairs, and clothes rained down on crewmen. It threw down wreckage for half a mile beside the tracks, then bore down on a farmhouse and pulled it off the ground. A dazed locomotive fireman watching this later told a newspaper reporter, "The house lifted a few feet in the air, then hung there and shook like a fish being lifted out of water." Then the building appeared to explode.
High atop an eight-story grain elevator under construction, a few dozen laborers were dumbfounded by this unfolding spectacle. They recovered their senses enough to realize they were about to become the next victims. Some managed to scramble down a ladder. Those who didn't cowered on the hardening concrete, waiting to be plucked off and hurled to their deaths. The men were spared when the shrieking twister weaved 100 yards to the north, tearing down the scaffolding around the elevator as it went.
It raged northeast, appearing ghostly white after its passage because the sun lit it from the west. Moving away and weakening, it inspired less fear. The tornado thinned and seemed to drag, to dislocate from its parent cloud. It became a tenuous, whipping umbilical cord linking sky and soil, hardly capable of toppling even an old barn. Dying, the rope grew yet skinnier until it dissipated, its malevolent energy spent.
White Deer had escaped with little damage and few injuries. A new path, 70 yards wide, cut across town. It was rudely marked by wrecked barns, garages, chicken houses, outbuildings, and a few homes, all amid a melting litter of golfball-sized hailstones. A woman who had been in the farmhouse nursed fresh scratches and bruises, as did a few train crewmen. At least the storm had passed, they all consoled themselves, and had lost its most vicious feature, the tornado.
But the real horror was just beginning . . .
For information on ordering In the Shadow of the Tornado by Richard Bedard, return to our home page:
Gilco Publishing home page