


By John Galvin
tristate tornado damage
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Akin, his mother and their entire home landed on top of the garage, which had landed on top of another house. Their once-tidy street was a wasteland of debris and houseless foundations. As the tornado closed in on downtown, Wallace's father was at his auto dealership.

"He went outside to chase down a car that was rolling away," Akin, now 84, told Popular Mechanics. "Some type of debris hit him in the back of the head. His eyes popped out of their sockets, but the person who found him put them back in, and took him to the local hospital."

At the Longfellow Grade School, children were rushing out of the building as it collapsed, trapping roughly half of the 450 students. A block away, at the railroad repair yard, 35 men were killed as the tornado laid waste to their so-called shops. According to Akin, the shops' many survivors rushed toward the school and began removing the rubble, "literally tearing their hands to the bone in their efforts." Eleven died there and many more were hurt. Many of the seriously injured, including Akin's father, were put aboard an emergency train that left for St. Louis 3 hours later.

Rescuers worked for days to clear rubble and look for survivors in Murphysboro. At a local school, a young survivor was pulled alive from the rubble two days later. But fires also ripped through town in the wake of the tornado, and in one neighborhood a man trapped under rubble died when rescuers were forced to flee the approaching flames.

By Akin's estimate, 243 people died in Murphysboro that day, 463 people required surgery, and many had limbs amputated even as the supply of anesthetics ran out. Hundreds of others had minor injuries. The tornado depressed the town's economy for 20 years. The railroad repair center moved to Alabama, and then the Great Depression hit. It wasn't until World War II, remembers Akin, that all the abandoned lots had been rebuilt and the town began to prosper again.

Joe Schaefer, the director of the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center, refers to the March 1925 phenomenon as the Murphysboro Tornado -- and with good reason. The tornado claimed its greatest single disaster there. But the twister had another 2 hours and 130 miles to go before it petered out. In the mining town of West Frankfort, Illinois, miners were forced to climb out of a 500-ft. underground shaft after the tornado cut power in the area. When they reached the surface, they found their community had been blown to splinters. Of the 127 people dead, most were women and children.

As the vortex crossed into Indiana at 4 pm, it hit its peak average speed of 73 mph and completely obliterated the town of Griffin -- killing 25 and injuring 202. The tornado then veered off its straight-line course by 9 degrees, and at that point witnesses reported three separate funnels swirling within the larger maelstrom. The tornado was on a collision course with the town of Princeton, Ind., and when it hit 18 minutes later it had lost none of its power. It destroyed 25 percent of the town and killed 45 people. The tornado rolled on for another 12 minutes before disintegrating into the history books. By then, it had killed 695 people, injured thousands more, and demolished 15,000 homes.

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