Nation: Carnage in Tornado Alley

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Deadly twisters rip along the Texas-Oklahoma border, killing at least 59

Hilde Graf was watching TV last week in her Wichita Falls, Texas, home when a tornado warning flashed on the screen. She rushed to a window and spotted a huge cloud darkening the horizon. With the twister bearing down at about 70 m.p.h., she jumped into her car and raced to the Sikes shopping mall, which she thought had a basement storm shelter. But there was no shelter at the mall, and Graf, along with hundreds of shoppers, cowered on the concrete floors of the mall's stores as the storm struck and merchandise and broken glass hurtled like cannon shot through the air. Outside, the death-dealing funnel tossed cars hundreds of yards in the air, flattening some and buckling others. Inside the mall, there was carnage. "People were screaming, and there was blood all over the place," said Graf. "A man lay on top of me. His clothes were ripped to shreds, and he was covered with blood."

The twister was part of the worst tornado system to hit Texas since 1953, when 114 people were killed in Waco. One evening last week, perhaps as many as ten funnels roared down the Red River Valley, along the border of Texas and Oklahoma. The corridor is known as Tornado Alley because its springtime atmospheric conditions-warm air from the Gulf collides with cold fronts from the north-make it ripe for spawning twisters.

The first of last week's terrifying funnels hit Vernon, Texas, killing eleven and injuring 60. Others touched ground at Lawton, Okla., and Harrold, Texas, while a flurry of follow-up storms struck several Arkansas communities. By the time the skies cleared, at least 59 people had been killed and nearly a thousand injured, 200 of them critically. About 8,000 were homeless. With property damage estimated at close to $400 million, President Carter declared the stricken valley a major disaster area, making the survivors eligible for low-interest federal loans.

Wichita Falls (pop. 100,000) was hardest hit by far. There three tornadoes joined together, creating a huge funnel with winds estimated at 225 m.p.h. It sucked up roofs, tore huge limbs from trees, and lifted the debris as high as half a mile into the sky. Said Roy Styles: "I crawled under a mattress, and that's all that saved me because the walls fell in." Cindy Trott, 22, fled to a science building at Midwestern State University for safety. Said she: "It didn't look like a tornado until it got up close to you. Then you could see all the lumber and junk swirling around, and we were panicked." When the storm passed, she hurried to her family's home on the city's densely populated southwest side. It was leveled, along with some 2,000 other houses in the city.

Ida Martinez and her daughter Chastity Dawn, 4, sat out the storm in the bathroom of her apartment in the Sun Valley development, where the clocks stopped at 6:15 p.m. sharp. "I leaned my back against the door and listened to the building tearing apart," said Martinez. "I thought that I was going to die. Things started flying, mud and water started coming under the bathroom door, and I could hear people screaming for help." Although Sun Valley was almost completely destroyed, she and Chastity Dawn escaped unscathed. Just a few hundred yards away, however, several people dining at two restaurants were killed.