Twisters

One afternoon last week a man walking along placid West Main Street in Belleville, Ill. suddenly looked up in horror, saw something approaching that looked like a giant black ice cream cone and roared with the noise of a hundred freight trains. That day, the same ominous sight and sound terrified farmers and townsfolk at random points through the Mississippi valley in Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Missouri, Alabama and Iowa. But in Belleville, where it was to destroy some 60 dwellings, kill ten people and injure 35, last week's twister struck hardest.

Tornadoes are more widespread than floods, that other natural scourge of the Mississippi River watershed, and kill quicker. The tornado is a fast-traveling column of whirling wind which not only devastates anything in its direct path but by its centrifugal force leaves a low pressure area in which air-filled buildings literally explode. Most serious that the valley has suffered in years, last week's tornadoes, according to Red Cross estimates, killed 20 people, injured 188, left 2,000 homeless, and were characteristically freakish:

¶ In Blytheville, Ark., Russell Jackson walked out of his untouched home to find three neighboring houses piled up in his front yard.

¶ In Missouri's "boot heel" region, mules were stripped of their hair, chickens cleanly plucked.

¶ In Belleville, the top and sides were whisked from an automobile, leaving Driver Louis Karna sitting intact at the wheel.

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