Storm Line

All day the sultry air lay heavy and oppressive over central Michigan. Scudding up from the south, dark cumulus clouds reared their anvil-shaped heads into a leaden overcast. The flatlands sweltered as the temperature climbed to 90DEG. Aloft, cool winds raced down from the northern Rockies, rode over the blanketing heat. The black, moisture-laden thunderheads ballooned, formed a storm line which writhed eastward toward the shores of Lake Huron and Lake Erie. Suddenly, swirling like water draining from some giant bathtub, the tornadoes spun out of the clouds and swept across the land.

The first twisters hit in the early evening, ripping through thinly settled communities near the Ohio-Michigan border. To the north, others moved erratically across the Michigan landscape. One hit Tawas (four dead), another Erie (four dead), another skirted Ann Arbor, 35 miles from Detroit. At Milford, Mich., the elementary-school band was practicing in the gymnasium when a twister sucked the roof off the gym, but hurt none of the youngsters.

Eerie Light. It was 8:30 o'clock when the big one hit suburban Flint. Cars and trucks bounced like baseballs through the ruined fields. Homes were flattened; factories, schools and shops were ripped apart board by board, block by block. After the wind, gas poured from broken mains, burned low along the ground with a sputtering blue flame. During the night, rescue workers burrowed for bodies in the eerie light. Flint's toll: 113 dead, 547 injured, $12 million in property damage.

On the southern tip of the squall line, Cleveland shuddered under hailstones big as golf balls as a twister rode in from the airport. The twister dragged its tail across the suburbs, skipped to the industrial "Flats," and wrecked a couple of downtown commercial buildings before it disappeared over the lake. In 29 minutes it curved over 12 1/2 miles, opened a half-mile-wide swath, killed eight, injured 300, wrecked 1,871 houses and did some $20 million of damage.

Splintered Rubbish. Next day the weather blew eastward toward New England. The forecast read "severe local thunderstorms" when at Petersham, Mass., in midstate, a funnel-shaped cloud formed over the picnic grounds in the Massachusetts Federation of Women's Clubs State Forest, took off across country toward Rutland. In Holden, a young housewife ran outdoors with her two-week-old son. The baby was torn from her arms and dashed to death on a rubble pile 100 yards away. The tornado reached the northern corner of Worcester, Mass. (pop. 203,486) in the late afternoon, mercifully missed most of the city's three-decker tenements, but struck full on a housing project area in suburban Great Brook Valley. There, the brick walls of apartments stood solidly, but roofs were ripped off. Frame houses were reduced to piles of splintered rubbish, or so scattered that only a few recognizable fragments could be found. Before morning, morgues and hospitals were crammed with 87 dead and dying. Eight hundred were injured; 7,000 were homeless, and property damage was reckoned at $75 million.

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