WEATHER: Caught in the Suburbs

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Kansas City's twister, like all tornadoes, kicked out of a vicious thunderstorm. The U.S. Weather Bureau's radar showed it by early evening as the hooked tail on an egg-shaped thunderstorm blob moving northeastward across Kansas one day last week. At 6:30 p.m., as the Missouri city was settling down to supper, a storm-warning volunteer near Williamsburg, Kans., 70 miles southwest of the city, backstopped the radar. In the storm's ugly grey clouds, he telephoned, was a groping funnel. Ten minutes later, urged on by bulletins from three television and seven radio stations. Kansas City's householders began heading for their cellars.

But in the five-year-old, middle-income suburb of Ruskin Heights on the southeast edge of the city, few of the trim houses (average price $12,000) boasted cellars. Worried parents herded children toward the nearest neighbor with a basement, and as many as 40 people huddled together in these rare dugouts. Not everyone heard the warnings, and not everyone who heard heeded them. By 7 p.m., when the twister swirled over the state line with a roar like a highballing freight train, the 16-store Ruskin Heights shopping center was dotted with evening shoppers. The tornado ripped a path 70 miles long, in some places ploughed a 1,000-yd. swath, splintered more than 700 homes and 40 stores. Ruskin Heights and its shopping center were hard hit. Four died when a supermarket roof collapsed. Total storm toll: 38 dead, 200 injured.

In the week before Kansas City's disaster, 22 people died when a tornado struck Silverton, Texas. In the week after, so many twisters swept the Southwest that the normally restrained Weather Bureau found the situation "fantastic." One storm hit the small (pop. 207) town of Fremont, Mo. and demolished it, killing six and injuring 50. Seven others died in Missouri tornadoes the same day. At week's end, the U.S. Weather Bureau logged the highest one-day tornado count ever recorded in the U.S.: 50 twisters whirled across the West and Southwest, killing at least four more.

With 173 tornadoes during the week and a record 563 logged this year, many experts predict that 1957 will smash all records.