The Day Before Spring

The tides of the upper air were calm as darkness fell. One balmy air mass pushed up from the Gulf of Mexico, flowed over New Orleans, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas. Cold air edged eastward from the Pacific. When the air masses came together, like rock strata along an earthquake fault, a storm was born.

Lightning's wild blue incandescence lit western Texas, northeastern Kansas and the panhandle of Oklahoma. The storm moved northeast. Before dawn of the day before spring, tornadoes began whirling out of it, like bursts of flame from a moving forest fire.

The little farming town of Fosterburg (pop. 250), Ill., had only half an hour's warning. Just after 6 o'clock in the morning, sunlight turned a sickly yellow and a warm wind blew. Then darkness fell] rain poured down in torrents, and a roar "like ten express trains" filled the sky. A Mrs. May Dingerson opened her,back door to investigate the awful noise. The door flew away. Then her front door flew open and all the windows burst. She felt as if her ears were full of water. Then everything went black. She woke, bleeding, in a pile of bricks and wreckage.

The wind stripped the clothes from scores; one man roused from unconsciousness, found he was wearing nothing but his belt and the pockets of his pants. People were blown bodily through the littered air. In three minutes, ten people were killed and all but four of Fosterburg's 80 houses and stores were reduced to debris.

The same tornado hit nearby Bunker Hill (pop. 1,350), demolished more than 200 of its 300 houses. Other tornadoes tore across the Indiana countryside, blowing over barns and wrecking trees.

Gales churned the Ohio River wildly. The wind blew 85 miles an hour in darkened, rain-battered Toledo, knocked over radio towers, derailed freight cars. As night fell, gales and torrential rain hit northern Pennsylvania and upstate New York. Finally, the storm blew out to sea.

The people of nine states surveyed the damage. An estimated 52 were dead, and hundreds injured. Rain-swollen rivers flooded valleys in Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, New York and Pennsylvania. Wreckage littered the Midwest landscape for a thousand miles.

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