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

through a plate glass window of the Odd Fellows’ Temple,” Adams said. “He was killed. A taxi careened around a corner, seemed to be running solidly, and in thenext instant, it tilted and rolled and then lifted over a sidewalk wall about six feet high. The chauffeur, I believe, must have been killed, as the machine was smashed to kindling.”
    Adams watched the entire roof of a small store blow away. Seconds later, a man who decided he was better off outside than in, charged out of the store. The man was lifted into the air, spun around for more than a hundred feet, and body-slammed back into the earth. The man didn’t get up.
    Similar to Elmendorf’s recollection, Porter would write that “a billion bumblebees could not have equaled the giant humming which accompanied the storm.”
    Of what it looked like, Porter called the tornado a “black storm cloud” that “rode a great white balloon of twisting electric fire.”
    Houses, according to Porter, collapsed like cards or simply disappeared. Another house, a three-story residence, was split in two, as if a giant sword had sliced it. Porter watched a cottage sail through the air and strike the fifth story of the Sacred Heart convent and smash apart the south wing as if it had been made out of paper.
    Then a house was picked up and hurled a quarter of a block and directly into the house of William and Ella Higgins.
    Where Mabel was.
    Then the tornado was gone. Porter ran for the pile of rubble that used to be his in-laws’ house.
    There was no warning of the tornado, no explanation from Mother Nature. The storm crossed diagonally through the city, across the western and northern parts of the city, attacking residential areas both wealthy and poor. It chugged along for about six miles through Omaha, leaving a path of destruction about a fourth to a half-mile wide. Instead of acting like some tornadoes, hopping into the air and then landing again, this cyclone’s path of destruction was continuous, staying low to the ground during those six devastating miles.
    Almost sixty years later, in 1971, Tetsuya Fujita, a meteorology professor at the University of Chicago, and Allen Pearson, head of the National Severe Storms Forecast Center, designed the Fujita-Pearson scale. The Fujita-Pearson scale designated tornadoes F1 to F5, with the lower F1 representing winds from 117 to 180 miles, and the F5 to describe a tornado blowing at 261 to 318 miles per hour. The tornadothat hit Omaha in 1913 is believed to have been an F4, which means winds were ranging from 207 to 260 miles an hour, and its path was a hundred miles long, a rarity for a tornado.
    But the power and durability of the Omaha tornado can really be told with this factoid: a sign from a store in Omaha was found in Harlan, Iowa—sixty miles away.
    One of the first signs indicating how unique and ugly this tornado was going to become was when a body dropped out of the sky.
    Charles Allen was walking at the corner of Forty-Fifth and Center Streets just after the tornado seemed to have materialized out of thin air. He was astonished to have a little girl, about four years of age, fall out of the sky into his arms. His shock turned to horror when he realized she was dead. He would live out the rest of his days wondering what her name was.
    At that point, the tornado had already crossed Woolworth Avenue, the street where Dorothy and Leslie King lived. It seems to have never come closer than five blocks away from the King home, but had it veered a little to the east, Dorothy King, and her as-of-yet unborn child, Leslie Lynch King, Jr., might have become casualties of the tornado.
    Dorothy King would then have never divorced her abusive and alcoholic husband, remarried, and moved to Michigan. Which means her son wouldn’t have renamed himself after his stepfather, and the country would never have gotten to know Gerald Ford, the future 38th president of the United States.
    If