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In Georgia's rural Dawson County, Henry Bearden, 63, herded his wife and sons into the kitchen at the first sign of the storm. A tornado passed right over the area, leaving Bearden and his family unscathed. But when he looked toward his daughter Delores' house next door, "there wasn't nothin' there." He found his daughter and her family in a pile of lumber that had been blown across the road: she and her son were dead, one of her daughters lay dying, and her husband Jimmy and another daughter were seriously injured. The center of the tornado must have passed directly over the house of Bearden's daughter. Because pressure inside the eye of a tornado is so low, a partial vacuum developed around the house and the greater pressure inside literally blew the structure apart. The raging winds then scattered the debris.
In Brandenburg, Ky., 29 were killed, most of them children caught playing outside after school. Relatives and friends at week's end were still having difficulty identifying some of the disfigured remains. One woman spent more than 24 hours searching for her 1½-year-old boy; she finally found him in one of the plastic bags that Army volunteers had been using to store the remains of dead victims. Most of the town's business section was wiped out. Said Kentucky Governor Wendell Ford after surveying the damage: "I looked at it and wanted to cry."
In Xenia, Ohio (pop. 27,000), half the town was demolished, 28 persons killed and more than 585 people injured. The storm cut a swatch a half-mile wide and three miles long through Xenia—all in five minutes. One terrified elderly victim, the roof of her small frame house completely blown off, sat wrapped in a blanket in a rocking chair hours after the holocaust. When firemen tried to persuade her to leave, she simply shook her head, refusing to say a word.
Curling Deaths. Karen Scott, 17, of Fort Wayne, Ind., was returning from Iowa with five companions in a Volkswagen bus. As the vehicle crossed a bridge over a narrow finger of Indiana's Lake Freeman, a tornado funnel lifted the bus and flung it 50 ft. into the water. Karen managed to escape the sinking vehicle and swim to safety. The body of one of her companions was found when the van was finally hoisted from the lake. The other four are still missing. When the tornadoes approached Madison, Ind., Larry O'Connell and his wife Beverly huddled with their four children in a closet of their bedroom. The only part of their shattered home left standing after the storm had passed was the closet. They were uninjured.
In Decatur, Ill., a 20-minute storm siege plowed a path 80 yards wide through three residential sections of the city, killing two people and damaging or demolishing 150 homes. Farther north, in Windsor, Ont., contestants at a local curling rink heard a loud bang, then saw one wall begin to buckle. Before the storm ended, two-thirds of the roof had been lifted off, eight people were dead, and 20 more were injured.