But the truth was, they had contained lives, and their erasure was the brutal consequence of prolonged exposure to nightmarish winds. I learned later that the tornado had crawled through Double Creek at around ten miles per hour, and sometimes much less. Given its size, that meant some residents were subjected to sustained winds of more than two hundred miles per hour for minutes on end. The tornado became a grinder awash in shards of wood and metal and God knows what else. If the wind didn’t kill you, the things it carried would.
In that kind of hell, what can stand? Driving through, where I noted a stray tennis shoe still dangling from a barbwire fence, I couldn’t help but wonder, Why Double Creek? In the hundreds of square miles of quiet country between Waco and Austin, in all that open farm- and ranchland where the storm could have spent its fury in harmless isolation, it found this tiny neighborhood—probably less than a mile square in size—and swept it from the world. Around here, the loss felt immeasurable. Entire families were simply gone, including every member of the Igo clan. The fifteen-year-old twin Igo boys, John and Paul, had worked at the same general store as me, where we’d overlapped just once.
Yet outside my little corner of Texas, the missing and the dead were one part of a much larger story. In cold statistical terms, the twenty-seven killed were but a portion of the yearly national toll. On average, tornadoes will claim eighty lives annually, a figure convulsed by significant variance; in 2011, for example, 316 died in a single day. The loss that year was staggering; it wasn’t just the people who died but the economic damage the storms incurred: some $28 billion in cost between April and May. In the United States, the damage caused by tornadoes has outstripped that of fires, earthquakes, and floods and is nearly on par with that from hurricanes. The most violent type—the EF4s and EF5s—are exceedingly rare, accounting for roughly one to two percent of all tornadoes. A storm chaser may never see an EF5 in his lifetime. Yet despite their infrequency, some seventy percent of tornado fatalities are attributable to the deadliest breed. The scale of these disasters is nearly beyond accounting.
An EF5 flattened a swath of Joplin, Missouri, on May 22, 2011. The trail of destruction it left behind was some six miles long and up to eighteen hundred yards wide. With 158 dead, and thousands of homes and buildings severely damaged or destroyed, the town called to mind images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombs. Streets were unrecognizable to residents who had lived on them for years. Joplin, as they had known it, no longer existed.
But the true testament to the tornado’s power can’t be observed from a helicopter circling high above. It’s on the micro level, in the little scenes and dispositions of objects that seem to defy explanation and the laws of physics. Researchers refer to these as “incredible phenomena.” In Joplin, damage surveyors found a truck that had been wrapped around a tree, the front bumper in contact with the rear. Cardboard had imbedded into the siding of the high school. A shard of wood had impaled a concrete parking curb. Steel manhole covers had simply disappeared.
The month before Joplin, the small town of Smithville, Mississippi, was largely destroyed by an EF5. A Ford Explorer was lofted for half a mile before smashing into the top of the town’s 130-foot-tall water tower. The vehicle then tumbled another quarter mile before finally coming to rest. The same day, in Tuscaloosa, another tornado sheared steel trusses from the train trestle over Hurricane Creek Canyon. One of the trusses, weighing about thirty-four tons, was blown one hundred feet uphill. Farther along the tornado’s path, at a coal yard, a thirty-six-ton railcar was lifted from its tracks and hurled nearly four hundred feet. Eyewitnesses say it didn’t tumble, it flew. On May 20, 2013, an EF5 chewed through the outlying suburbs of Oklahoma City, killing twenty-four. In one subdivision, two brick houses, sitting some ten feet apart, had been pierced by the same two-by-six board. It passed clean through the first before lodging in an interior wall in the second.
Yet for all these brute displays of unfathomable strength, there are just as many stories surrounding the wind’s incongruous tenderness. The same day SUVs and railcars were airborne, a restaurant in Ringgold, Georgia, called Chow Time, was damaged beyond repair. The ceiling was caved in, the walls collapsed, but at the center of it all sat a cake fit to be served. Its frail glass container hadn’t even cracked; every last swirl of frosting was pristine. In Joplin, a child’s play set, made of nothing sturdier than hard plastic, survived unscathed. Surrounded on all sides by uprooted trees and pulverized homes, it was as though it alone had been spared.
With seasonal regularity, the continental United States is scored with the tracks of tornadoes, from the Deep South up to the High Plains. Most last only seconds, a fleeting discontinuity swiftly rectified. But a vanishing few sink lasting roots into the storms that spawn them, becoming so enormous, and so powerful, that they sustain themselves for hours over dozens of ruinous miles. It’s one of the most awesome expressions of force in the natural world, and also one of its most unpredictable.
Tornado warnings issued by the National Weather Service have a false-alarm rate of roughly seventy percent. When they are accurate, the average lead time between warning and impact is around fourteen minutes. The people of Joplin had seventeen minutes. On September 20, 2000, Xenia, Ohio, received no warning at all. The weather service had issued a severe-thunderstorm warning, but its radar failed to detect the signature of the coming tornado. By the time the F4 arrived, it had knocked out power to
