Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (3 page)

“Everybody keep cool and lie in the center of the car,” shouted Hensley, grabbing two women who were boarding the streetcar and pushing them to the floor while dropping down with them. Nobody needed to be persuaded otherwise. Charles H. Williams, one of the passengers, managed a curious glance at the storm and a fleeting thought—
It looks like a big, white balloon
—as he watched houses blowing away and trees rocketing into the sky. But like every other passenger, he dropped to his hands and knees and joined the pile of humans that had collected onto the floor of the center of the car.

Then the windows shattered. Trash, not rain, enveloped the car. A heavy wooden beam crashed through one window and poked out the other. Wooden planks, tossed by the wind, landed on top of the streetcar passengers. Then as quickly as it had come, it was over for the passengers, and Hensley, Williams, and the others staggered to their feet, unhurt.

The patrons of the nearby pool hall were having their own problems. Eight African-Americans were playing at one pool table, with the rest of the crowd watching. Then everyone heard what sounded like a freight train roaring toward them, and the roof shot up into the sky and, along with it, the pool table. Seconds later, the pool table, along with the roof, came crashing to earth, killing most of the onlookers. A fire broke out next. The county coroner managed to rescue three of the men from the rubble and was likely haunted for the rest of his life by the sight of another man burning to death. In all, fourteen men died in the pool hall.

Several blocks away, the conductor of the streetcar on Forty-Eighth and Leavenworth wasn't as brave as Ord Hensley had been. This conductor saw the approaching tornado and jumped off, running for his life and leaving his passengers behind. One of them, Leon Stover, a thirty-year-old bookkeeper for a department store, moved behind the controls and tried to drive the streetcar and outrace the tornado. It was a nice try, but the twister swept past the streetcar, raining glass and splinters onto a bloodied Stover, who was suddenly aware of a father's anguished cries. The father's baby had been ripped from his arms and blown into the void.

The Diamond Picture Theatre collapsed, killing thirty people inside. The Sacred Heart Convent was turned into firewood. Then the tornado turned its attention to William O'Connor.

William was eight years old. He had just been sent by his older brother to go to the drugstore across the street from the family's house to buy some stamps. A few moments later, Lawrence O'Connor, eighteen years old, saw the storm and shouted to the rest of his family—his parents and five other siblings—that a cyclone was coming and to run for the shelter.

Lawrence didn't go to the shelter. He chased after William.

His little brother was reaching the pharmacy when Lawrence grabbed him and pulled him back across the street toward the house. Halfway across the street, the tornado caught Lawrence, who was still clinging to William, and flung the two brothers both into the air. All the way up, and then all the way down, Lawrence never let go of his younger brother.

A group of people were huddled in the garage of a brick building at 40th and Farnam Streets when the tornado made direct impact. It—and they—were suddenly blown away.

Inside the house of Rose Fitzgerald, a 33-year-old widow, guests were sitting down for a birthday dinner. The guest of honor, Patrick Hynes, eighty-one and a widower, must have been feeling pretty good about where he stood. He had seen plenty in his life since his birth in Ireland in 1832. He fought in and survived the Civil War. His children, married and with children of their own, seem to have been doing well. His son, William, in particular, had a successful elevator company. Surrounded by friends and family, Patrick Hynes gave a little speech to raised wine glasses, and as they all began sipping to good health, the house came crashing down.

Hynes climbed out of the rubble with a fractured leg but was otherwise uninjured, and most of the guests crawled out, although not everyone. His daughter Margaret had two broken arms and internal injuries. “Oh, if only it had been me instead,” Hynes later said.

Another party was going on at the home of Benjamin Edholm, a 62-year-old Swedish-American carpenter, and his wife, Hanna, 61.

Hanna saw the tornado first. She drew the shades but before she could corral everyone in a cellar, an object burst through the window
and slid across the table and crashed onto the floor with most of the dishes.

It took a moment to realize what that object was: a human body. Then, to everyone's astonishment, the naked body, a man, sat up, grabbed the tablecloth and wrapped it around his body. The man asked for some trousers, was hastily given a pair of Benjamin Edholm's, and dashed out the door without even introducing himself.

A Mrs. F. Bryant, 92, was lying in bed on the third floor of her son's house when walls and floorboards blew apart around her. Mrs. Bryant plunged to the ground and even farther than that, landing in the basement. She was covered in debris, but she also was still in her bed and alive. Her son and daughter-in-law, also still alive, managed, with a lot of difficulty, to remove enough rubble to help her out.

When Edward Dixon saw the funnel cloud, he stopped what he was doing and spun around in fear. The tornado was smashing his neighbors' houses into oblivion, and, by the looks of it, planning on paying a visit to the Dixon residence in less than a minute. The 39-year-old chemist fled upstairs, shouting for his wife to gather their three children.

He never reached the second floor.

Strong winds, the tornado's advance team, hit the house, sending explosions of glass from the windows and into the living room. As if grabbed by an unseen hand, Edward was plucked off the stairs and pulled into the dining room, where he landed flat on his face. Dazed, his right ear aching from a shard of glass that had been, moments ago, part of one of his windows, Edward was nonetheless still alive. He struggled to his feet to find he was surrounded by his wife Opal and their three terrified children: eighteen-year-old Nina, twelve-year-old Lester, and six-year-old Doris. It was clear that within seconds they were going to all die.

But Edward and Opal shepherded their kids to the cellar anyway. Behind them, they fastened the lock shut.

And behind the door was the tornado. Before the Dixons had a chance to hide and huddle, the ceiling above them disappeared.

When it was all over, once the tornado had left Omaha entirely, people began taking stock of what had just happened. In Elmendorf's hotel, nobody had moved since the tornado began, and once it ended, for a long stretch of time, nobody emerged outside. According
to Elmendorf, they confirmed that it was a tornado when either the telephone rang or someone called from the front desk, which seems unlikely since many and possibly all of Omaha's telephone lines were down. Perhaps because it was getting dark, or maybe the staff discouraged the guests from leaving, Elmendorf and his fellow traveling salesmen would wait around and get reports on the tornado damage, not leaving to look around until the morning.

At another hotel—or possibly it was Elmendorf's—Mary Knudsen, a servant for an affluent family, came into the lobby as a disheveled mess. She was hysterical but managed to verify to everyone that a tornado had blown apart the city.

The Dixons were not sucked out of their basement along with their ceiling. Edward, Opal, Nina, Lester, and Doris somehow were left alive and in their cellar, which was the good news. The bad news was that the cellar was on fire. But Edward scrambled out and managed to pull his wife and children out of the hole in the ground before it became a fire pit.

Afterward, the Dixons stared at their neighborhood, or what was left of it: telephone poles at 45-degree angles, upturned Model T Fords and uprooted trees, and wooden planks, brick, and debris strewn about. It looked like running carefree and barefoot on a lawn would never be possible again. Of course, as is almost always the case with a tornado, there were some fortunate houses standing as they had always been, as if nothing was amiss at all. The Dixons could see fires in the distance—there were about twenty infernos throughout Omaha, although none too serious; they were all put out by firefighters and the rain within the next three hours.
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In the trees and on telephone wires hung bedsheets and clothes.

If the Dixon family could have reached into the future to summon the image, they would have thought it looked as if Omaha had been blasted by a nuclear bomb.

But at least they were around to see it. “We had lost our all,” Edward later told a journalist, possibly Thomas Porter, “but were thankful for our lives.”

One girl, Margaret Matthews, would later write to a popular children's magazine and share what the tornado aftermath was like for some of the Omaha residents.

“I'm sure I shall never forget it as long as I live,” recalled the thirteen-year-old. “I didn't see the tornado cloud, but I heard the roar, and that was enough. I was not at home at the time, but over at my chum's for the night. We were up-stairs and the folks were down, and all of a sudden we heard a loud roar, and the lights went out, and we ran down-stairs. My chum's mother had seen the cloud, and had called for us to come down, but we had not heard her. It did not hit their house nor ours, and we are very thankful. All that night, people came running in, asking for help, and we did not sleep much.

“Next day, I went around to see the ruins, and I am glad I went once, but I would not go again. One poor old man had lost his house and family. The house was laying on its side, and he couldn't talk—he just cried.

“Now,” Margaret continued, “every time the least little cloud comes up, every one rushes out to look, and most rush to their cellars.”

Small wonder people were afraid. Taking in the sights was too much to bear. Approximately 1,250 buildings had been demolished into rubble, including eleven churches and eight schools. Featherless chickens bobbed back and forth as if nothing had happened, and the occasional cow could be found impaled on a fence post. A man's body hung in a tree.

The bodies of Cynthia and Thelma, two babies, were located a good distance from the wreckage of the orphanage where they spent their short lives. Elsewhere in the city, a toddler whose mother was killed was found in the street alive, playing with a dead dog.

Clifford Daniels didn't make it. He was a mail carrier who was described by his pastor as a strikingly good-looking fellow who was well liked by all. He and his wife, Luella, and their two daughters, six and four years old, were found in the ruins of their house; the girls were embraced in the arms of their mother, while Cliff was found on top of them, which suggested to everyone that he had tried to shield them with his body.

Eighteen-year-old Clifford Daniels, Jr., escaped the cyclone's wrath, but only because he hadn't been home.

The tornado also pulverized the home of Mrs. Mary Rathkey and her two grown sons, Frank and James. Their clothes were ripped off by the wind, and their naked bodies were flung into a field about a half-mile away.

Families and individuals who did survive rightfully marveled at their fortune to be alive. John Wright, a 64-year-old railroad worker, surveyed the rubble of his house and realized he was probably only alive because he had left for work half an hour early, not wanting to be caught in what he thought was going to be rain. Then he marveled at how sixteen years earlier, when he lived in Norfolk, Nebraska, his house had been destroyed by a tornado, and forty-two years earlier, when he lived in Panora, Iowa, he barely escaped with his life during yet another cyclone.

Others probably didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the tragic absurdity of it all. Professor E. W. Hunt had been in his basement and staring up at the ceiling when the rest of the house began falling onto him. When he regained consciousness, he found a summer straw hat on his head, only to realize it had been two stories above him and hanging in a closet a short while before.

And still others immediately rushed to help the wounded. F. J. Adams found a man with a wound and two broken arms. The man was unconscious but alive and taken away to a nearby makeshift hospital. Adams never learned the man's name or his fate.

Townspeople rallied around the cries of Gladys Crook, a fifteen-year-old who was walking outside when the tornado came. She didn't have time to run inside and ultimately didn't need to: instead of taking cover inside a house, a house covered her. It took half an hour, but someone finally chopped a hole big enough in the side of the home so that Gladys, incredibly, was able to climb out, shaken but unhurt.

It took fifteen minutes, but Thomas Porter managed to pry his wife and her family, hiding in the basement, out of the wreckage. Once it was determined that everyone was all right, Porter had to go to work. He wasn't an exclusive reporter for any of the Omaha newspapers. He was a special correspondent—the term today would be freelance journalist—for a variety of newspapers, and Porter needed to take note of what he saw and get it on the telegraph wire as soon as possible. That is, if he could find a telegraph. Clearly, there was a lot of destruction,
and it was obvious that communication lines might be down. Simply from his own front porch, Porter would later count forty-nine leveled houses.

Throughout the streets of Omaha were bodies, although occasionally those bodies would turn out to be alive. Lawrence and his younger brother William were taken to the Webster Street telephone exchange, where an impromptu medical center had been set up. William was relatively fine. Lawrence had been badly banged up with several broken bones and would spend the next three weeks laid up in the hospital, but he, too, would live to tell friends and family about the part he played in Omaha's most infamous tornado in which, according to most tallies, 140 lives were lost, 322 people were injured, and 2,179 men, women, and children were made homeless.

Elsie Sweedler, a telephone operator, was found wedged between two fallen trees; and when someone realized that she was breathing, firemen were called to saw the trees apart in order to free her. Shortly after she was revived, Sweedler went to her employer, the Harney Telephone Exchange, and reported for duty. She worked all night. It was a selfless act that helped bring both normalcy and assistance to Omaha.