“What happened next is difficult to describe. No one saw the spectacle of the unfolding elements, since no one dared to look at it. But if anyone had dared, he still would not have seen anything …
The travelers saw only the very beginning of the hurricane. One of the approaching tornadoes, bumping into the van, crumbled into thick black dust - it seemed that powder rain had started from the sky. But that was just the beginning.
A gap appeared for a short time, and the travelers were poured with hot air, as if from the throat of a blast furnace. Then, with a whistle and howl, a gusty wind blew, carrying a chilling cold; his howls were so deafening that all the trumpets of Aeolus seemed to herald the arrival of the King of Storms.
A moment later, the Nord overtook the caravan, and the travelers who stopped on the subtropical plain found themselves in a frost similar to that which fetters the icy mountains on the Arctic Ocean.
Everything was enveloped in darkness, nothing could be heard except the whistle of the wind and its dull roar as it flew into the awnings of the vans. The mules, instinctively turning their backs to him, stood still. The voices of the people who were talking excitedly in the carriage and vans were drowned out by the howl of the hurricane.
All the cracks were closed, because as soon as you lean out from under the canvas canopy, you could suffocate. The air was full of ash, raised by the raging wind from the scorched prairie and turned into deadly fine dust.
The reader, of course, learned the description of the tornado from the famous novel by Mine Reed "The Headless Horseman." Perhaps, nowhere are tornadoes more terrible than in the USA. The Americans themselves call them tornadoes - from the Spanish word "tornado", which means "rotating". Tornadoes are especially frequent and destructive in the southern states of the United States, adjacent to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. In these areas, warm, moist winds (blowing from the bay) meet with colder and drier air masses coming here from Canada and the Pacific Ocean.
As a result of such a "meeting", violent thunderstorm activity arises and develops. First comes the exhausting heat and stuffiness. Then black clouds gather into a dense cloud cover that hides the sun. Gusts of frenzied wind raise clouds of dust and various paper trash on the streets. Lightning flashes, thunder rumbles. A huge amount of water pours out of the ominous leaden clouds onto the ground. It is in such a dramatic environment that tornadoes are born - vortices that form in a thundercloud.
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American catastrophic vortices have a funnel up to one kilometer in diameter. In such a vortex, the wind speed can reach an incredible value - three hundred meters per second, which is more than a thousand kilometers per hour. This speed cannot be measured by any instruments, and it was estimated by experiment, having studied the destructive effects of a tornado. More than once, for example, it was noted that during a tornado, chips were driven into the trunk of a pine tree.
Typical tornadoes, descending, like an elephant, a trunk from a low thundercloud, move along an irregular track, destroying a strip of land several meters wide. The length of the path of a tornado is different: some of them disappear, not even one kilometer, others can make a route from 15 to 60 kilometers.
From such inexorably cruel whirlwinds in the United States, up to three hundred people die every year, and sometimes more. For example, in 1953 for five spring-summer months the number of human victims exceeded 500, and the property damage was estimated at $ 150 million.
And this is what happened on February 10, 1959. Shaggy leaden clouds hung over the serenely sleeping St. Louis, Missouri. At exactly two o'clock in the morning, a swift whirlwind, like a fabulous dragon, swept over the city. He swallowed everything in his mouth that came in his way. The whirlwind was accompanied by such a red glow that it seemed as if thousands of rockets soaring into the sky illuminated the "battlefield".
A few hours later, where the borders of this frenzied "attack" passed, there were overturned cars and destroyed buildings. Some of the houses had walls torn down, others "exploded" from the pressure of air inside the building itself, so the rarefaction of air in the center of the tornado was.
Nineteen killed and 265 injured - these were the consequences of this natural disaster. The Negro quarters of the city, where the houses were dilapidated, suffered especially badly.
Physicist K. Flammarion in his writings cites the following eyewitness account:
In early April 1974, over the territory of several US states (in the South and Midwest), there was such a large number of tornadoes that the country's meteorological service had never recorded before - up to 100 in one day! The forecast service warned on April 3 that a very cold air front over the Rocky Mountains displaced a mass of warm, humid air that came from the Gulf of Mexico, therefore, a riot of nature is possible. But despite this warning, the tornado caused a lot of trouble. 329 people died, over four thousand were injured, tens of thousands of people lost their relatives and friends, lost their homes and all property.
An American newspaper of the time described the devastating disaster as follows: “On that terrible day, April 3, 1974, at 3:55 pm, National Service teleprinters in Louisville rattled off bulletins warning residents of Meade County, Kentucky. The tornado is moving northwestward at approximately 50 miles per hour. However, in reality, this tornado turned out to be a single tornado, seen by only a few observers. A real tornado made a smooth arc, bypassing Hardingsburg and Irvington, and, rapidly gaining speed, struck Brandenberg with all its might. Few of the 1,700 residents of this ancient, quiet town have heard the warning broadcast on radio and television. And the trouble was already a few minutes away. Some, however, even from a distance noticed the approach of a black funnel-shaped cloud,others were struck by the roar of a train. At 4.10 a hurricane roared into the city, scattered almost half of its residential buildings, administrative and commercial buildings, smashing furniture to pieces, crushing cars like grapes. Several dozen people died, more than two hundred people were injured … This devastating tornado was one of more than a hundred tornadoes that raged in eleven American states on that gray rainy day and evening. "which raged in eleven American states that gray rainy day and evening. "which raged in eleven American states that gray rainy day and evening."
Lek Craycroft, a 53-year-old resident of Brandenberg, had just returned from the store with his mother-in-law and was putting his purchases on the table when there was a crash. Grabbing his mother-in-law's hand, Craycroft rushed to the door leading to the basement. They were already descending the steps when their house was blown away like an ordinary grain of sand. Craycroft himself was lifted and thrown through the rubble. Scratched all over with a bleeding head, he came to himself a hundred yards from his house.
Rising up, he looked around: Green Street with its houses, trees, cars, power lines had disappeared. It was pouring rain … Nothing remained of the house except the hole where the cellar was. The tornado scattered the foundation of cinder-concrete blocks, tore the steel pillars of the supports from the concrete floor. The car turned into a heap of scrap metal. Under these ruins, Craycroft found his dead mother-in-law.
In addition to the state of Kentucky, the tornado that day brought devastation to ten other states. In the state of Georgia heavy rain fell with hail the size of a pigeon's egg. In Alabama, the city of Gwynne was literally wiped out. More than 20 people died here - one for every hundred inhabitants. In Indiana, a tornado passed through the city of Monticello over Lake Freeman: it lifted four sections of a railway bridge into the air, ripping them off the concrete supports. The sections, each weighing 115 tons, were thrown into the lake at a distance of sixteen meters.
On the outskirts of Hanover (the same state of Indiana), a resident of the city Sylvia Hume saw three craters above her house at a height of five meters. “They roared like a huge coffee grinder. The largest tornado blew a caravan nearby. I hid in the closet, and then I heard a deep roar and some kind of smacking sound. The house seemed to be moaning, the walls of the closet sagged inward and outward,”she later said.
The whirlwind passed relatively high above Sylvia Hume's house and did not cause serious damage to it. But he lifted the neighboring house together with its inhabitants into the air, turned it 360 degrees and lowered it nearby to the ground. Proceeding further to the river, the tornado raised huge columns of water, uprooted trees, "rotating their trunks in the water, like a giant washing machine."
In the village of Bear Branch, a tornado blew the wall of the bathroom in which the Waltson family took refuge. All family members were simply "blown out" into the street, and in front of the head of the family, the five-year-old daughter was carried through the air over the apple tree and lowered to the ground twenty meters from the house. And then covered it on top with a sheet of roofing iron torn from some kind of roof …
HUNDRED GREAT DISASTERS. N. A. Ionina, M. N. Kubeev
