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| At 7:14 p.m. on an early summer evening in 1966, an EF-5 tornado a half-mile wide barreled over an Indian burial mound at the southwest edge of Topeka, Kansas, and proceeded to slash an eight-mile channel of destruction across the breadth of Kansas’ capital city. The towering black column packed winds of more than 200 miles an hour as it roared through the community. By the time the twister lifted over Topeka's eastern outskirts about 20 minutes later, a university and approximately 800 homes and buildings had been destroyed. Another 3,000 were damaged. The total cost of the devastation topped $100 million, making the tornado one of the most destructive in American history. And Hell Followed With It: Life and Death in a Kansas Tornado reconstructs the spellbinding tale of that epic day. Dozens of people from all walks of life who survived the event have been interviewed; each provides a highly personal and often emotional account of what they saw, felt and heard. The book also provides a panoramic backdrop of time and place. There’s the Indian legend about the hill that was supposed to shield the city from tornadoes and the curse that destroyed that protection, the history of settlement on the Great Plains and a gritty rendering of everyday life in a largely blue-collar, middle-American community in the mid-1960s. (from topekatornado.com) |
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