Twisters Left Mark on Past 50 Years

BY JOE KOLMAN
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

Arcadia, Neb. - As he followed his wife, three young children and hired man into the storm cellar, Guy Lutz paused and held up 5-year-old Bobby so he could see the tornado ripping across the fields of corn and barley toward them.

The pause was brief.
 

The same storm killed a family of 10 that lived across the road.

Guy closed the door, saying, "It's a bad one. It's going to hit us." They huddled together in the dark on that June afternoon in 1953. The adults covered the children's ears. There was an explosion. Suddenly, it was quiet.

"I thought, 'It's over. That wasn't so bad,'" Guy's wife, Joy, said recently.

But the rampage was not over. Again the cacophony of the storm filled the cellar.

"It was just 'RRRR, RRRR, RRRR,'" said Joy, now 84. "And then it got quiet."

Guy swung open the door. Awaiting him was total devastation: crops ruined, homes demolished, neighbors and livestock dead.
 

	Joy Lutz, above, remembers the day in 1953 that she, her husband, Guy, and their children waited out a tornado in their storm cellar in Arcadia, Neb.

The Arcadia storm has been the deadliest to hit Nebraska in the last 50 years, a period that has seen 2,353 tornadoes, 51 deaths and an estimated $1 billion in damage.

Somewhat atypically, this year's conversations about the hurricanes of the Plains are revolving around the relative lack of tornadoes. Local and national experts say that based on unofficial reports, this has been an unusually quiet year.

"This was one of the least active tornado seasons in over a decade for the Central Plains," said Kenneth Dewey of the High Plains Climate Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Through Friday, 685 tornadoes have been reported nationwide. In past years, reports by this time usually have exceeded 1,000.

Reports from Nebraska and Iowa this year are closer to the typical amount than other states, with 41 reported in Nebraska and 65 in Iowa, said Joe Schaefer, director of the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.
 

	The family emerged to find their new car destroyed and their home demolished, below.

Schaefer cautioned that reports haven't been verified and might include multiple sightings for the same storm.

Storm chasers are eager for a return to normal next year, said Tom Grazulis, director of the Tornado Project, a Vermont-based organization that posts tornado information online.

"They're expecting a good season because it doesn't get any worse than this," Grazulis said.

According to the historical trend, a normal year might include millions of dollars in damage but few deaths.

Despite the killer status often assigned to twisters, only 20 of the 2,353 Nebraska storms recorded since 1950 have been killers, most recently in 1988. From 1950 through the end of last year, 51 people lost their lives to Nebraska tornadoes, according to federal data.
 

	They had bought the concrete block house just a year earlier.

By comparison, traffic accidents caused 295 deaths in the state last year alone.

Only four tornadoes since 1950 reached the most intense rating of F5 on the Fujita Scale of Tornado Intensity, meaning the winds were strong enough to disintegrate homes and fling cars.

By comparison, 80 percent of the tornadoes were rated F0 or F1, meaning they have wind speeds of less than 112 mph. (The Fujita rating was established in the 1970s. Tornado experts assigned ratings to prior storms based on damage.)

That is not to say Nebraska twisters have not wreaked havoc. More than 1,100 people have been injured by tornadoes since 1950. Estimated property damage is slightly more than $1 billion.

Two of Nebraska's neighbors have been hit harder during the same time period. In Iowa, tornadoes killed 68 people and injured nearly 1,700. Estimated damage exceeded $1.7 billion.

In Kansas, tornadoes killed 255 people, injured almost 2,800 others and caused estimated damage of $1.6 billion.

For the Lutzes, the destruction was total. The concrete block house they had bought a year earlier was rubble. Their new 1953 Studebaker lay mangled 200 yards from where they had parked it.

All nine buildings, including a 40-foot-tall silo, were leveled. Dead hogs and wind-plucked chickens littered the yard.

"It's gone, it's all gone," Guy said as he looked around.

He and Joy were both 38. Their youngest child, Tommy, was 2 weeks old. Guy had recently quit working as a mechanic and was starting to build up their farm.

He looked across the road and down a hill about 100 yards to the Madsen place.

Gone was the grove of trees that had surrounded the home, which was now smashed to pieces.

Guy could hear no screams. No moans. No voices.

He started down the road. Along the way were scattered body parts. One by one, as he found his neighbors, he talked to them.

"None of them spoke to me," Guy recalled.

He figured that the 10 extended members of the Madsen family were probably eating Sunday dinner, gathered for the first time in the newly remodeled house. The trees that had surrounded the farmhouse might have prevented them from seeing the approaching tornado.

Guy and Joy, who still live in the area, recounted the details of the tragedy recently as they spread yellowed newspaper clippings from across the country on their dining room table. Among the photos they have saved is a haunting black-and white image of 11 caskets lined up in a stark white room.

The caskets held the Madsen family, ranging in age from 7 to 63, and Lester Hubbard, a 60-year-old bachelor farmer who lived nearby.

While the Arcadia tornado and others have been well-documented, historic information about tornadoes is not exact.

For decades, tornadoes in rural areas probably went undetected because no one saw them, said Gene Bowman, a warning coordinator meteorologist with the National Weather Service in North Platte. More populated areas tended to have more tornado reports.

But in the mid-1990s, with new radar systems and more aggressive investigation of possible tornadoes by the National Weather Service, the number of reports increased nationwide, Bowman said.

For example, Nebraska's Cherry County is a place with vast spaces and few people.

"You can have monsters out there for miles and nothing happens," said Bowman.

Between 1950 and 1995, 35 tornadoes were reported in Cherry County, compared with 30 in the last four years. Other rural western counties also experienced jumps in recent years.

A heightened interest in twisters may also contribute to increased reports, Bowman said.

But overall, he said, the data fits with what experts would expect to find: that south-central Nebraska has the most tornadoes. The basic tornado ingredients of heat, humidity and colliding air masses are often present in counties such as Hall, Buffalo, Dawson and Lincoln.

Howard Maxon, 20-year head of the Emergency Management Department in Grand Island, said tornado awareness and preparation have improved over the years.

"Every day that goes by, there is someone who gets the message," Maxon said.

More education and improved warning systems might have contributed to fewer deaths: In Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas, more than half of all tornado-related deaths occurred between 1950 and 1970.

Before 1950, one of the area's deadliest twisters was the Easter Tornado of 1913, which killed more than 100 people in Omaha. Other storms that day killed 17 people in Council Bluffs and another 16 in western Iowa.

Bowman said weather experts are still a ways from predicting when and where tornadoes will hit, but he added that they will improve.

"We simply have to get better at it," he said.

The Lutzes had only a moment's notice. About 3 p.m., Guy Lutz heard something and looked out a window.

"Get the children and go to the cave," he shouted. "A storm is coming."

Guy was devastated at the losses his farm sustained. At one moment during the aftermath, he started to cry.

"Don't worry, Daddy, we'll put it all back," Bobby told his father.

Bobby, who now goes by Robert, lives on the property today. He also bought the old Madsen farm, where a grove of trees again stands tall.

Robert said he remembers his father lifting him up to see the black cloud. He remembers hands covering his ears. And he remembers waking up during nights following the storm, afraid another twister was going to hit.

That fear is gone.

"Storms do not worry me," Robert said. "I always said, 'It's never going to hit here again.'"

Once was enough.

Near the west entry to the Arcadia Cemetery sits a stone that will mark the final resting places for Guy and Joy Lutz. Farther down the dirt track are the stones dedicated to the Madsens.

The whim of fate is not lost on Joy. For a 1978 book about the history of Arcadia, she wrote about the tornado of 1953:

"Each year we visit the Arcadia Cemetery and the 10 graves side by side and we wonder. We had no warning of that storm, but just at the right moment, Someone prompted Guy to look out the window - and we are alive."