Kansas City's twister, like all tornadoes, kicked out of a vicious thunderstorm. The U.S. Weather Bureau's radar showed it by early evening as the hooked tail on an egg-shaped thunderstorm blob moving northeastward across Kansas one day last week. At 6:30 p.m., as the Missouri city was settling down to supper, a storm-warning volunteer near Williamsburg, Kans., 70 miles southwest of the city, backstopped the radar. In the storm's ugly grey clouds, he telephoned, was a groping funnel. Ten minutes later, urged on by bulletins from three television and seven radio stations....
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