"Like the Hand of God"

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

March goes out like a lion with Carolina twisters and a howling nor'easter

Hazel Taylor and his wife Yvonne joined hands in terror as the tornado funnel raced toward their mobile home in Abney, S.C. The winds tore the trailer apart, lifted up the Taylors and whirled them 100 ft. through the air like two figures from the second circle of Dante's Inferno. Rescue workers found them lying in a field, dazed but alive--and still holding hands.

The Bell family of Winnsboro, S.C., had no such luck. Ulese Bell, 52, and his son Ulese Jr. dived under a bed as the funnel approached. But Maude Bell, 48, wanted to see the storm's awful majesty. "She just walked out of the room and into the den to watch the hail fall," says Ulese. "Within three or four seconds, wham! The house just collapsed." Ulese dug his wife of 28 years out of the rubble, but she never regained consciousness.

By week's end 60 lifeless bodies had been pulled from the wreckage of small towns along a 300-mile arc through the Carolinas. Some two dozen tornadoes had touched down during a six-hour period Wednesday, leveling houses, stores and barns and tossing tractor-trailers through the air like children's toys. The death toll from tornadoes was the highest in the U.S. since April 1974, when 300 people were killed in the South and Midwest.

At least 1,050 people were injured last week in the Carolinas, and perhaps 3,000 more were left homeless. "It looked like the hand of God reaching down to crush us," said Joyce Leonard of the funnel that ripped through Mount Olive, N.C. She and her two children survived by taking cover in a ditch. Said North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt: "We have never seen a disaster like this before, and we pray to God we never see one again."

The Carolina twisters formed the front line of a monster storm system that turned into a howlingly lethal nor'easter as it moved up the Atlantic Coast. On Thursday, the tenth day of spring, and on into Friday morning, heavy, wet snow, sometimes mixed with sleet and accompanied by thunder and lightning, fell from Virginia to Maine. Up to two feet of snow piled up in central New York State. Snowplows clearing runways at Boston's Logan Airport occasionally ground to a halt when their drivers were bunded in whiteouts of whirling flakes.

Winds frequently reached hurricane velocity of 70 m.p.h. along the coast; the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory in Massachusetts recorded one gust of 108 m.p.h. The winds blew down enough power lines to leave 250,000 homes and businesses, mostly in Massachusetts and Connecticut, without light or heat. After being stranded at La Guardia Airport in New York City, Walter Mondale canceled plans to campaign upstate.

Wind-whipped waves slammed into coastal towns in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts, forcing thousands of people to leave beachfront homes by boat or even in the buckets of bulldozers. Atlantic City was newly isolated from the New Jersey mainland for five hours by waves that flooded highways, tore away a 100-ft. section of the Boardwalk and left the lobbies of three gambling casinos sodden from ocean water. Scores of people who had been evacuated from their homes sat on the red carpets of the city's mammoth convention center, drinking coffee and nibbling sandwiches supplied by a New Jersey food concession; one casino served ribs and asparagus to 100 of the temporarily homeless. On Cape Cod's Nauset Beach, the 473-ft. Maltese freighter Eldia rammed aground. A Coast Guard helicopter flew through 40-to-60-m.p.h. winds to carry the Eldia 's 23 crew members to safety, two at a time. A dozen deaths throughout the Northeast were attributed to the storm.

Nowhere, however, was the terrible power of weather so destructive as in the Carolinas. Tornadoes are among the most awesome of all natural phenomena. Their surface winds have been known to reach 400 m.p.h. The air pressure in the center of a twister drops so low so fast that buildings sometimes explode under the force of the normal air pressure contained within their walls. The cause of tornadoes seems to be an unusual disparity between cold temperatures in the upper air and warm ones near the ground. The warm air rushes upward with exceptional power and has a whirling motion imparted to it by the rotation of the earth. The centrifugal force of the whirling creates low pressure and suction at the center in an upside-down version of the whirlpool formed by water pouring down a bathtub drain.

Last week's Carolina twisters skipped along erratically, touching here and there, missing big cities by pure chance but devastating small towns and farming areas into the northeast corner of North Carolina. The first tornado touched down in Newberry, S.C., at 5:15 p.m. Peggy Wilson, owner of the Wilson Dance Academy on Main Street, was giving a lesson to seven children when, she recalls, the sky took on an eerie greenish hue. "A few seconds after that I heard what sounded like a million trains coming. The children ran to us and grabbed us around the legs and started screaming 'I don't want to die!' " Wilson and her sister Linda Busby herded the children under a staircase, where they survived as the academy exploded in a hail of broken brick. Says Busby: "The pressure was so strong from the wind that my eyelids were peeled away from my eyes."

Truck Driver Norwood McClain, 41, pulled into a truck stop Wednesday evening to phone his home near Winnsboro, S.C. His son Jeromy, 14, answered and suddenly shouted,' "Daddy, the house is shaking!" Said McClain: "I told him to get out. That's the last I heard of him." Jeromy turned up in a hospital in critical condition with broken back, arms and ribs. On Thursday his father poked through the rubble of his home, too heartbroken to pick up some family pictures he found. Said McClain, pointing to an area 30 yds. away: "I lost my 2 1/2-year-old son over there. They found him in a ditch."

The twisters left behind scenes that might have been conceived by a macabre surrealist. In some farming areas the dead bodies of cows were found hanging from trees, and in McColl, S.C., an aluminum fishing boat was wrapped around a tree trunk like foil paper. Near by, all that remained of what had been a section of old frame houses was a field of splintered wood, with undamaged household articles sticking out incongruously. Two rescue workers diverted themselves from the grim task of searching through the debris for bodies by staging an impromptu open-air musicale. One weary young man sat down at an undamaged piano and picked out a tune; a second snatched a toy trumpet from the wreckage of a nearby house and tooted an accompaniment.

President Reagan promptly pledged federal disaster relief for the stricken areas, and neighbors of the homeless provided food, clothing and shelter. Unhappily, though, the darker side of human as well as physical nature was on display. Cleanup efforts on Thursday were hindered by traffic jams that backed up two to three miles on either side of the North Carolina-South Carolina border. The cars were packed with families out for some ghoulish sightseeing. --By George J. Church. Reported by Richard Hornik/Boston and JohnE. Yang/Atlanta, with other bureaus

With reporting by Richard Hornik/Boston, John E. Yang/Atlanta