by Lee Sandlin
When they emerged into the late-afternoon sunlight, they found their town was gone. Hundreds of houses had been destroyed, the land scoured down to the foundations, and the families that survived were wandering helplessly through the traces of where the streets had been. Even the heaps of debris seen in other towns were missing; almost all of it had been carried off by the cloud and was raining down on the earth miles away.
There had been a storm like this once before: the great mysterious tornado of 1805 that had cut its way through the forests of southern Illinois and had left the endless windroad behind. The 1925 storm followed almost the same track and lasted just as long. It crossed from Missouri through Illinois into Indiana, hour after hour, through the course of the afternoon. It didn’t come to an end until some time after four o’clock, somewhere in the Indiana farmland. There witnesses reported that it destroyed itself in the open country in a vast collision of dissipating and undulating funnel clouds.
It was called the Tri-state Tornado, and its damage track of 219 miles is still the longest on record. The Tri-state Tornado is also the deadliest tornado in American history. The 1805 tornado had been as powerful a storm, but its path had taken it through the uninhabited wilderness country; by 1925 the landscape of southern Illinois had been cleared and occupied. The fantastically lush world of southern Illinois that had once been called the American Bottom had been supplanted by an endless clutter of mines and factories and farms. The Tri-state Tornado crossed small mining towns and new industrial towns and old agricultural market towns strung out in skeins along the tangles of the rail lines. In its wake nine hundred people were dead.
By late afternoon the news of what had happened was spreading out from eastern Missouri and through Egypt and out into Indiana. The storm had been so peculiar, so tightly organized, and so swiftly moving that in many towns its passage had almost gone unnoticed outside the areas of immediate destruction. In Murphysboro and West Frankfort, people on the opposite side of town had heard and seen nothing at all; they weren’t even aware anything had happened until they saw the smoke rising from the dozens of raging fires.
The rescuers converged erratically, without plan, with no idea what had happened or what kind of help was needed. Their ignorance was compounded by the destruction of the phone lines and the telegraph lines. Special trains bringing medical personnel and supplies began arriving along the tornado damage track after dark; the engineers were uncertain what towns to make for, and they often found the rails destroyed or buried in debris. The rescue work was also hampered by the weather, which was turning bitterly cold. Snow was falling along parts of the damage track by midnight.
Over the next few days and weeks, the Red Cross arrived with food and other supplies; tent hospitals were set up in public squares; the Illinois Public Health Department was vaccinating people for typhoid. People all over Egypt were already calling the tornado God’s judgment on the gang warfare. Even those less sure of God’s role were concerned that the gangs and other undesirables would somehow find a way to take advantage of the chaos. There was a public announcement in Murphysboro two months after the tornado: “Women and girls are asked to stay off the streets by city and county officials due to men of all character swarming into the city since the tornado. These are men of character such that they have no respect for women.”
Egypt today has no direct traces of the Tri-state Tornado. But it remains a pervasive presence in the region’s history—particularly the long, unrelieved decades of economic depression and physical decrepitude that followed. An oral history of Murphysboro published in the 1990s was called When the Whole World Changed—changed for the worse, and changed because of the tornado. The tornado was blamed for everything from the decline of local industry to a widespread rabies epidemic that followed in the summer of 1925. Nobody knew what a tornado had to do with rabies. It was really just a way of expressing the belief that the tornado had opened up a wound that could never be healed.
17
Canvas and Cellophane
The USS Shenandoah was the first large rigid airship built in America. It was a monstrous construction: almost seven hundred feet long, and filled with more than two million cubic feet of helium. It was an immense undertaking even to inflate—particularly then, since in the 1920s, helium was extremely scarce and expensive. (It was extracted in small quantities from the natural gas fields of Texas and the Oklahoma Panhandle.) The helium was contained within twenty enormous fabric bags that were suspended from the frame within a spiderweb of wire braces. Beneath the bags, running the length of the airship, was a keel corridor that held the crew’s quarters, galley, food lockers, and oil tanks for the propellers. The propellers and the control car (for the captain, navigator, pilots, and engineers on duty) were lower still, attached by metal struts to the underbelly of the ship. The entire ship was encased in a cotton sheath coated with a brilliant aluminum adhesive paint that could be seen from miles away.
By 1925 the Shenandoah had already made one transcontinental voyage. This was a grand soaring tour through the South and the Southwest, up the West Coast, back south again, then a swing around the Rockies, and then northeast across the plains and through the Ohio valley. The crew of forty-three, together with a reporter and an artist from National Geographic magazine, watched with dreamy euphoria as the great vistas unfolded below them: the endlessly meandering track of the Rio Grande, the shifting tans and grays of the scrublands, the oceans of the prairie pieced out into farmland and crisscrossed by new networks of dirt roads—and everywhere, in cultivated fields and at rural gas stations, in the parking lots of roadside diners and the public squares of market towns, people staring upward in astonishment as the vast silver airship glided puttering over their heads. The trip was such a success that the army immediately proposed an even grander voyage: due north across Canada, to take part in the latest Arctic expedition. But there were too many worries about its stamina in polar conditions. Instead, it was sent out on a more colorful and amiable expedition: a tour of state fairs in the heartland.
The airship departed from its base in New Jersey on September 2, 1925. Its top speed was seventy miles an hour; the weather was good, and it was able to keep up a decent clip all day and into the evening. By midnight it had crossed Pennsylvania and was passing into Ohio. The air was growing still and sultry. The crew found the conditions ominous, but the forecast from the Weather Bureau was reassuring: continued clear and calm through the night. The ship’s commander, Captain Zachary Lansdowne, made the decision to trust the bureau forecast and continue on. He retired for the night to his quarters.
Around 3:00 a.m., the crew in the control car spotted lightning on the northwestern horizon. Then the airship began to be buffeted by strong winds out of the northwest. Lansdowne was summoned to the control car. He took one look at the sky and immediately ordered a change of course.
The airship took a wide turn toward the south. It moved away from the storm through clear air, with the Ohio countryside spread out below. It was a placid scene—the headlights of a few cars and pickup trucks moving along the winding roads, the lights of a town (it was Cambridge, Ohio) in the middle distance. But the air around the ship grew turbulent again. The skies ahead and behind were muddy with clouds, and the winds were growing stronger. The airship’s forward progress came grinding to a halt in a flood of contrary winds. The storm was closing in. The airship had no escape route open; it was simply going to have to ride out the storm.
Around 5:00 a.m., the airship was engulfed by the forward edge of a gigantic, horizon-to-horizon squall line. Immediately within the billowing wall of clouds the airship encountered a swiftly ascending convection column. The ship was caught and was buoyed upward at high speed. The crew members began a frantic release of helium. They managed to level off at above a mile up. But too much helium had been released, and the ship had lost its buoyancy; the moment the ship drifted out of the convection column, it began a rapid dive. Now the crewmen had to release ballast (several tho
usand pounds of water) as the ship took its sickening slide. They were able to pull out of the dive and bob up into a zone of calmer air at around three thousand feet. But there was still nowhere for them to go. They were surrounded by the steeps and cloud canyons of a raging thunderstorm. They drifted helplessly into another big convective column, this one with strong rotating winds. The airship was sucked into an ascending current so powerful its nose was pulled almost vertical.
The crew knew that this ascent was one the ship couldn’t survive. As it shrieked up the column, it began to twist. The rotating winds were inexorably pulling its midsection apart. The crewmen could only grab hold of whatever fixed objects were in reach and hang on. They watched in horror as the vast latticework of steel struts and cables that held the rows of helium gasbags in place began to disintegrate. The silvery exterior sheath bent, bulged, and finally ruptured: great gaps in the skin opened up to the storm. The bow and the stern pulled away from each other, and the ship tore in half. Two crewmen lost their grip and fell out through the widening gap into the titanic, lightning-lit abyss. As the heavier stern section began to descend, its still-attached cables yanked the control car out of the struts that kept it bolted to the bow section. The control car swung loose; its weight pulled all the cables out with it, and they tore away from the engines at the stern. Then the whole tangle went tumbling to the earth. All the trapped men in the control car—the captain and eleven crewmen—were killed in the crash.
The two halves of the airship sailed free from each other. The stern section floated out of the convection column and began a slow meandering descent through the lower depths of the storm. Twenty-two crewmen were still aboard that section. Within a few minutes of rain-lashed, wind-buffeted chaos, they were jarred by a shattering impact: the stern had come down in the open countryside. Then it began skimming and bouncing along the ground, pushed by the fierce rainy gusts at the surface. There was a tearing collision with a stand of trees; the branches ripped another gaping hole in the skin, and four of the crewmen were hurled out to the ground. They were badly bruised in the fall, but they all survived. The stern bounced several hundred yards forward into a shallow valley. Once it was out of the winds, it sank in a heap into the muddy ground. The eighteen crewmen still aboard were all alive. They emerged cautiously into the rainy predawn air, where they were met by a party of local farmers awakened by the fearsome commotion.
Meanwhile, the bow section, once it was freed from the control car, was carried upward by the convection column into the higher reaches of the storm. There it drifted in wide slow circles at the top of the column, among billowing cloud tops and above long crackling and booming trails of lightning. Seven crewmen still clung helplessly to their perches in the wrecked latticework. The storm continued to rage below them, while the sky above was lit up by the gathering dawn. After almost an hour of circling, the crewmen were able to reach the release valves of the surviving gasbags. They began a cautious descent.
The wrecked bow coming down out of the clouds was a spectacular vision: a gigantic ragged tube trailing silvery shreds of its skin. The crew began shouting and waving to the farmers who were emerging into the dawn to marvel at the sight. One farmer caught a rope that was dangling down from the ship and tied it off around a tree trunk; the bow bobbed and tugged, but the line held, and the crewmen began hopping down to the earth. They seized more ropes and got the bow lashed. Then they and the farmer took turns shooting at the exposed gasbags with pistols and rifles until the wreck finally deflated.
The blame for the Shenandoah disaster was universally laid on the Weather Bureau for failing to predict the thunderstorm; some smaller measure of blame went to the ship’s captain for believing the bureau. In all the critical editorials, the ruling assumption was that the bureau’s forecasts had never been particularly useful or trustworthy. What was new was the belief that accurate forecasts mattered.
American society was becoming more mobile. That was the time when the first commercial aviation companies were carrying passengers and cargo around the country. The army was expanding its Air Corps and establishing new air bases. And there were flocks and schools of private planes popping up everywhere; some manufacturers of private planes were encouraging their use for suburban businessmen to commute into the city. All these aviators required for their own safety specific, localized, and detailed weather forecasts. All of them were consistently appalled at the vagueness and uselessness of the bureau’s product.
The army’s pilots were so frustrated by the bureau forecasts that they began lobbying the army command for a forecasting system of their own. They were successful: the Signal Corps was tasked with providing detailed weather forecasts for military aviation. Not forty years after the Allison Commission and the power struggle over military versus civilian control of the National Weather Service, the corps was back in the weather business. By the end of the 1920s, it had weather stations at most of the major air bases on the East Coast and through the heartland.
Civilian aviation companies had to be more ingenious. They developed their own networks of weather spotters. The system was simple: a pilot flying a long route would periodically land in a convenient town, find the nearest telephone, and place calls down the line to his list of spotters to ask them what the weather was like where they were. It was far more useful than listening to bureau forecasts. The most celebrated aviator of the age, Charles Lindbergh, was one of those most openly contemptuous of the bureau. In a quickie memoir published immediately after his first transatlantic flight, he made a particular point of saying that he always flew “paying almost no attention to weather forecasts.” They were so unreliable, he said, that “I do not want to condition my mind with them.”
Bureau officials could hardly be oblivious to these sorts of insults, and in the wake of the Shenandoah they did make some efforts at modernizing their approach and engaging with cutting-edge research. Their most daring move was to bring in a young and brilliant meteorologist from Sweden named Carl-Gustaf Arvid Rossby; he was hired to set up a meteorological service for civilian aviation and to train the staff meteorologists in the latest European ideas. Rossby’s specialty was the study of air masses and weather fronts, concepts that the old-school staffers at the bureau had been resisting for more than a decade. They complained that his methods of frontal analysis would require hundreds of new weather stations just to obtain enough data; Rossby told them that they hadn’t needed data before because they were obviously just making their forecasts up.
Rossby lasted at the bureau barely eighteen months. He went off to a professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There he would become famous among meteorologists for his studies of global atmospheric circulation and the jet stream—the meander waves he discovered in the jet stream are now called Rossby waves—and for his reanalysis of the role the Coriolis force plays in violent weather. Rossby would also offer a conclusive refutation of an idea that had been around since William Ferrel: that tornadoes were affected by the Coriolis force. The violent rotation of the tornado, Rossby’s work showed, is not related to the rotation of the earth; it’s caused by the interplay between the tornado vortex and the angular momentum of the inflowing winds, a phenomenon now known as cyclostrophic balance. (Technically speaking, the ratio between inertia and the Coriolis effect is now quantified by “Rossby numbers”: the high inertia of a tornado gives it a high Rossby number; hurricanes are Coriolis-driven and have a low number.)
The bureau missed out on all of this. But then, it had no use for Rossby’s ideas generally. The staff meteorologists continued their old methods of forecasting as though Rossby’s time with the bureau had never happened. It would require another ten years, a new chief, a new head of research, and a new generation of university-trained staff meteorologists before the bureau was finally brought to acknowledge the existence of warm fronts and cold fronts. But this was about par. One estimate made in the 1920s was that the minimum length of time it took the bureau to approve and impl
ement any change in policy, no matter how minor—even upgrading to a better brand of thermometer—was seven years.
The bureau might have done as well to look at older ideas. If it wasn’t comfortable with young hotshots like Rossby, it could have taken some inspiration from the earlier generation of meteorologists like John Finley. He was still around and still dispensing advice to anyone who’d listen. He had made a go of his National Storm Insurance Bureau for years; by the late 1920s, he’d expanded its scope and was dealing more and more with aviation companies and underwriters who wanted data on the weather-related risks of air flight. Finley himself, though he was in his late seventies, was spending almost all his time on the road, traveling around the country to do field reports on the causes of airplane crashes.
The Weather Bureau did ultimately get in touch with him—but only out of nostalgia. It was compiling a historical archive and soliciting memoirs from all the old survivors of the Signal Corps days. Most responded with a few brief and jovial paragraphs about the wild old days in the frontier weather stations, the camaraderie in the Fact Room, the dangers of signal work during the Indian Wars. Finley wrote page after page. His old obsessiveness about detail hadn’t slackened; three times he withdrew his submission, saying he wasn’t satisfied with it, and he rewrote it to make it longer.
Finley remained vigorous well into his eighties. During the Great Depression he moved full-time into aviation work: he closed up the National Storm Insurance Bureau, moved back to his hometown in Michigan, and opened a new business, which he called the National Weather and Aviation School. He was the principal instructor. He gave lectures on applied meteorology, theoretical meteorology, climatology, and his new specialty—practical weather forecasting for civil aviation. He was as strong and lively as ever. When his beloved wife, Julia, died in 1934, he remarried a few months later. He didn’t retire from teaching at his school until 1939. He died on November 24, 1943, at the age of eighty-nine.