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" There&amp;#039;s never been another tornado like it. The 1925 Tri-State Tornado rode a straight-line path for 3.5 hours across 219 miles of Missouri, southern Illinois and Indiana, making it the longest single tornado track anywhere in the world. With a mile-wide diameter it looked wider than it was tall -- so big it lacked the classic genie-in-the-bottle funnel. By the time it had finished its run it had obliterated whole towns, sent thousands to the hospital, and killed more than twice the number of people lost in the next deadliest tornado in U.S. history. In 1925, the word &amp;quot;tornado&amp;quot; wasn&amp;#039;t even in the vocabulary of the U.S. Weather Bureau (now the National Weather Service). The word had been banned since 1887, when the U.S. Army Signal Corps managed the country&amp;#039;s weather forecasting. Tornadoes were utterly unpredictable, the logic went, and forecasting them, besides being a fruitless venture, would only spread panic among the public. Forecasters weren&amp;#039;t allowed to study tornadoes, or even acknowledge their existence in public. The forecast for the central Midwest on March 18, 1925 was for showers and cooling temperatures -- nothing out of the ordinary. While tornado forecasting was officially nonexistent, the weather bureau had been tracking a cold, low-pressure system that bent down from western Canada into Wyoming and all the way to the Oklahoma-Texas border before curving back towards southeastern Missouri. The jet stream wasn&amp;#039;t discovered until World War II -- when Japanese scientists were experimenting with transoceanic balloon bombs -- but most likely its path that day mirrored that of the storm front. And the jet stream&amp;#039;s wind speed was probably very strong, given how fast the tornado traveled. A warm front from the Gulf of Mexico raised temperatures by 10 degrees in the region, causing warm air to rush skyward and providing what forecasters today call the tornado&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;lifting mechanism.&amp;quot; The merged storm system transformed into a tornado-producing spiral, and the gray skies drizzling over southeastern Missouri began to turn an ominous black. At 1 pm (on the 18th), a column of twisting air materialized near the town of Ellington, Mo., killing a local farmer. Traveling 72 mph, it took 14 minutes to hit Annapolis, where it killed four more people and destroyed 90 percent of the town. An hour later, the tornado spun off two adjacent funnels before it mowed through Biehle. It reformed into a single system a few miles later while making its way across the rolling farmland toward the Mississippi River. The tornado left Missouri; it had traveled 80 miles through mainly rural farmland and killed between 11 and 13 people in 83 minutes. Illinois would fare far worse. At 2:26 pm, the storm approached the town of Gorham, Ill., throwing golf-ball-size hail as it advanced. &amp;quot;There was a great roar,&amp;quot; recalled Judith Cox in the St. Louis-Post Dispatch two days later. &amp;quot;Like a train, but many, many times louder. &amp;#039;My God!&amp;#039; I cried. &amp;#039;It&amp;#039;s a cyclone and it&amp;#039;s here.&amp;#039; The air was full of everything, boards, branches of trees, garments, pans, stoves, all churning around together. I saw whole sides of houses rolling along near the ground.&amp;quot; Cox was having lunch in town at the time. She tried to leave the restaurant, but was blown back inside as the building collapsed. The restaurant&amp;#039;s cook was crushed, but Cox was pulled out of the rubble alive, along with a cow that had been picked up and dropped on the roof. The tornado killed 37 of the town&amp;#039;s 500 residents and destroyed every building in it. Next in line was the 12,000-person rail hub of Murphysboro. Wallace Akin, a retired tornado scientist from Drake University in Iowa, was 2 years old when the tornado closed in on his Murphysboro home. &amp;quot;An invading army of debris swept over the western hill -- trees, boards, fences, roofs. Day became night,&amp;quot; writes Akin in his 1992 history of the Tri-State Tornado, The Forgotten Storm. Akin&amp;#039;s mother huddled over him in a family room as the tornado struck. &amp;quot;The house began to levitate and, at the same time, the piano shot across the room, gouging the floor and carpet where I had played only moments before. The walls began to crack as the roof ripped free and disappeared, joining the swirling mass of debris. But the walls and the floor held as we and the house took flight.&amp;quot; Akin, his mother and their entire home landed on top of the garage, which had landed on top of another house. Their once-tidy street was a wasteland of debris and houseless foundations. As the tornado closed in on downtown, Wallace&amp;#039;s father was at his auto dealership. &amp;quot;He went outside to chase down a car that was rolling away,&amp;quot; Akin, now 84, told Popular Mechanics. &amp;quot;Some type of debris hit him in the back of the head. His eyes popped out of their sockets, but the person who found him put them back in, and took him to the local hospital.&amp;quot; At the Longfellow Grade School, children were rushing out of the building as it collapsed, trapping roughly half of the 450 students. A block away, at the railroad repair yard, 35 men were killed as the tornado laid waste to their so-called shops. According to Akin, the shops&amp;#039; many survivors rushed toward the school and began removing the rubble, &amp;quot;literally tearing their hands to the bone in their efforts.&amp;quot; Eleven died there and many more were hurt. Many of the seriously injured, including Akin&amp;#039;s father, were put aboard an emergency train that left for St. Louis 3 hours later. Rescuers worked for days to clear rubble and look for survivors in Murphysboro. At a local school, a young survivor was pulled alive from the rubble two days later. But fires also ripped through town in the wake of the tornado, and in one neighborhood a man trapped under rubble died when rescuers were forced to flee the approaching flames. By Akin&amp;#039;s estimate, 243 people died in Murphysboro that day, 463 people required surgery, and many had limbs amputated even as the supply of anesthetics ran out. Hundreds of others had minor injuries. The tornado depressed the town&amp;#039;s economy for 20 years. The railroad repair center moved to Alabama, and then the Great Depression hit. It wasn&amp;#039;t until World War II, remembers Akin, that all the abandoned lots had been rebuilt and the town began to prosper again. Joe Schaefer, the director of the National Weather Service&amp;#039;s Storm Prediction Center, refers to the March 1925 phenomenon as the Murphysboro Tornado -- and with good reason. The tornado claimed its greatest single disaster there. But the twister had another 2 hours and 130 miles to go before it petered out. In the mining town of West Frankfort, Illinois, miners were forced to climb out of a 500-ft. underground shaft after the tornado cut power in the area. When they reached the surface, they found their community had been blown to splinters. Of the 127 people dead, most were women and children. As the vortex crossed into Indiana at 4 pm, it hit its peak average speed of 73 mph and completely obliterated the town of Griffin -- killing 25 and injuring 202. The tornado then veered off its straight-line course by 9 degrees, and at that point witnesses reported three separate funnels swirling within the larger maelstrom. The tornado was on a collision course with the town of Princeton, Ind., and when it hit 18 minutes later it had lost none of its power. It destroyed 25 percent of the town and killed 45 people. The tornado rolled on for another 12 minutes before disintegrating into the history books. By then, it had killed 695 people, injured thousands more, and demolished 15,000 homes. The Aftermath  &amp;quot;The single biggest thing that happened as a result of the Tri-State was the increase in public awareness about tornadoes,&amp;quot; says Harold Brooks of NOAA&amp;#039;s Severe Storms Lab in Norman, Oklahoma. &amp;quot;Even though the National Severe Storms Laboratory had a ban on using the word &amp;#039;tornado,&amp;#039; it was the beginning of local tornado-spotter networks. There were no official programs that we know of, but when you look at old newspapers you start to see mention of these spotters after 1925.&amp;quot; According to Brooks, the storm-spotter programs contributed to a steady decline in the number of tornado deaths in subsequent years. Today, 50 people are killed by tornadoes annually; at the 1925 rate, that number would be 500. It took another 23 years before modern tornado forecasting was born. On March 20, 1948, a tornado tore through Tinker Air Force Base near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Gen. Fred Borum asked two of his meteorologists, Capt. Robert Miller and Maj. Ernest Fawbush, to look into predicting tornadoes for Tinker. The forecasters&amp;#039; first major test came just five days later, when they informed Borum that the weather looked a lot like it had on March 20. Borum asked if they were going to issue a tornado forecast. &amp;quot;We pointed out the infinitesimal possibility of a second tornado striking the same area within 20 years or more, let alone in five days,&amp;quot; Miller wrote of the event. &amp;quot; &amp;#039;Besides,&amp;#039; we said, &amp;#039;no one has ever issued an operational tornado forecast.&amp;#039; General Borum responded: &amp;#039;You are about to set precedent.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; With much trepidation, Fawbush and Miller issued their alert for between 5 and 6 o&amp;#039;clock that night. Much to their surprise, they had been right. A tornado again tore through Tinker. This time, Borum had ordered planes hangared and air traffic diverted, sparing much damage to the base. Not long after that, the U.S. Weather Bureau dropped its ban on the word &amp;quot;tornado.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a1965/4219866/>