Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever Read Free

1881 that had leveled a few blocks in the city, although the loss of life, according to an issue of The American Architect and Building News that came out that month, was “trifling.” Still, Omaha didn’t have an intimate relationship with tornadoes, and its residents felt no danger or fear toward tornadoes.
    That was about to change.
    Porter called for his nineteen-year-old niece, Clem. Porter had doted on her ever since his older sister, Fannie, a poet from Glasgow, Kentucky, had come to Omaha in 1905. Fannie, forty-seven years old and a widow since the turn of the century, had been sick for the last two years, traveling the West and hoping the warmer climates would improve her health. Whether she came to say good-bye, or if it was unexpected, she died close to her family members. Clem, named for her father, Clement, an attorney, was thirteen years old and all alone. Porter, unmarried, was too. That is, until he met Mabel Higgins a short time later. She was a 28-year-old clerk at a law firm. Both late bloomers for a married couple in 1913, three years after saying “I do,” they still weren’t parents yet. Clem was all they had.
    Her uncle showed Clem the skies and explained why he believed a tornado was coming.
    Exactly what Clem said next is left to the imagination, but one has to conclude that they probably discussed Mabel and whether they should alert her. Mabel was with her parents, 63-year-old William, a business owner, and Ella, 61 and in poor health, and possibly both of her siblings, her older sister, Bertha, and her younger brother, Leslie. It’s possible that Clem or Porter or both ran the five blocks and reported their concern about the tornado, but they knew Mabel and her family were aware of the weather and probably didn’t want to worry anyone on just a hunch.
    At about 5:30 in the afternoon, the clouds became considerably darker—almost green—and then the clouds formed one massive, dense, black wall.
    Porter wasn’t the only one who noticed the skies. F. G. Elmendorf, a traveling salesman from Indianapolis who had just arrived from Chicago, discussed with some fellow salesmen the ominous-looking dark clouds that had shown up after a little rain, and they were nervous. Still, Elmendorf went about his business and picked up something to read, killing time in his hotel’s lobby.
    Another visitor to the city, a man who gave reporters the name of F. J. Adams, didn’t like how the sky looked. He decided he was going to get out of the city.
    It was a smart decision, made a little too late. As Adams walked toward the train station, the temperature plummeted, and the sky turned black. There were a few drops of rain. It was windy. Still, when the funnel cloud barreled toward him, having first touched down fifteen minutes earlier, eighty miles southwest at Kramer, Nebraska, before racing past Lincoln and into Omaha at six in the evening, nobody, not even Adams, could say that they had been expecting it.
    Inside Elmendorf’s hotel lobby, the traveling salesman was sitting next to a window. Then he noticed that the sun seemed to have disappeared. He could hear a humming sound, “the most fearful and peculiar sound I ever heard,” he would say later, and thunder crashed over the city, as did rain. But he wasn’t sure exactly what was happening outside his hotel.
    Porter and Clem ran downstairs to the basement. But it was for Clem’s benefit only. Porter sprinted back upstairs to watch the tornado. If it developed into anything important, he wanted to be able to give his readers a first-hand account of the storm.
    Porter stood on his porch, amazed at what he was seeing. There was a tornado, all right, and it was beginning to carve up his city.
    F. J. Adams was thrown against a building, and it must have saved his life, for he was able to remain where he was and watch the world collapse around him.
    â€œI saw a man picked off his feet and blown