F5: Devastation, Survival, and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the 20th Century

I learned of Mark Levine's book, F5, some weeks ago, but before I had a chance to read it, my attention was captivated by a lead story in the media. A monstor tornado had just obliterated my boyhood home of Greensburg, Kansas. I had not lived there for most of my adult life, decades, but, I still had family and relations living there. Anyone growing up in Kansas has heard plenty of tornado tales, yet, I never saw one personally, and had only the vaguest idea of their causes. Mark Levine's book has changed that. F5 gives a comprehensive view of the causes and conditions that spawn them and makes the science come alive in the life of the man who came to be known as "Mr. Tornado."Most compelling, however, is Levine's ability to get inside the lives of more than a dozen people of Limestone County, Alabama who experienced a super outbreak of tornadoes on April 3, 1974. I marveled at his understanding of these unfortunate people. He must have spent countless hours interviewing them, most probably over many repeated visits. The book opens with an account of a couple of teen-agers who drive into the teeth of this killer storm. The immediacy of the authors prose puts you in the car with them, seeing what they see, feeling what they feel.In F5, we know what these few experienced, what they lost, and the agony they suffered. We also learn how their lives were permanently altered by those brief, horrifying, and blurry moments in 1974. This is a book that I'll probably read a second time.

The 1974 Super Outbreak was history's greatest, producing 148 tornadoes of which sixty five were F3 or greater in strength. The whirling clouds of death affected an area from Canada down to the deep south and claimed over 300 lives. Even 2011 cannot fully compare here. (More tornadoes but weaker) Tornadic conditions were about as perfect as they ever will be.So, it might be said, is Levine's book. The outbreak is too big to fully cover in all particulars, so he takes both a broad and narrow perspective. He broadly runs through the disaster, discussing the destruction of Xenia, Brandenburg and the tornadic swarm, while also zooming in on Limestone, Alabama, telling the tale of what actually happens to individuals caught in the path. Other chapters interspersed put the reader in the 70's, covering the social and cultural developments behind the mindset of the times. But the tornado disaster always remains center stage. So while Levine doesn't write about every aspect of the storm (how could he) and changes direction from time to time, he still creates one of the best disaster works out there. A book, that like the monster twisters of the super outbreak, doesn't come around often.

Mark Levine has written a reasonably thorough account of a series of tornadoes that swept through Limestone County in northern Alabama in 1974, part of what record books later described as a "super outbreak."Some of the chapters look elsewhere for information. We get "Mister Tornado", Fujita himself, in an entire chapter. He deserves the epithet for what amounts to an obsessive study of the monster storms. We get chapters on how thunderstorms develop and why some of them spawn tornadoes. And we get a chapter on the devastation wrought by the 143 twisters in other parts of the country on that April day and evening.It's all pretty scary. I was driving through central Indiana at the time and about two o'clock in the afternoon, the AM radio simply stopped playing music and began broadcasting nothing but tornado warnings which, to someone unfamiliar with the lay of the land, sounded like gibberish. "The courthouse and downtown area of Corn Patch have been heavily damaged but we expect most of the danger to be east of a diagonal line between Wayne County and Tippecanoe County." I had to pull over every half hour and consult a road atlas to figure out the least threatening route until finally I decided it was impossible and hunkered down for some hours in the basement conference room of a bank in Martinsville with a comforting pint of booze, enduring the indignant protestations of my wife. We pushed ahead later and I finally found myself on my knees in a motel in Frankfort while the town of Monticello, an hour's drive north, was being flattened.I only mention this personal stuff because I'd like to emphasize how terrifying this outbreak was, not just for me but for all those I met in Indiana. Every CB radio was tuned to a local channel for immediate news. What struck me later as curious is that the potential victims most likely to minimize the threat are those in which tornadoes aren't known to be common (eg., the 1953 storm in Worcester, Massachusetts) and those in which the storms are most frequent, as in Oklahoma and parts of Texas. In the second case, the tendency seems to be to deny the danger by saying, "We get these warnings all the time and nothing ever happens", or by allusion to some local legend, "Tornadoes never cross that river", or "This town is built on an ancient Indian graveyard that protects us from twisters."Well, let's not step into that particular psychological quagmire. These excursions aside, Levine sticks to the families of Limestone Country, Alabama, on the Tennessee border. He must have spent an awesome amount of time on research -- not just the local newspapers (some of them tiny) but doing interviews with notebook and tape recorder. Yes, there were so many characters involved in the book that it's easy to lose track of them. And within each chapter he skips from family to family, back and forth, until I was no longer sure of who was who. With some exceptions. The mobile broadcaster, the colorful sheriff, and the black pastor are unmistakable because they're unique.The responses of the people in the path of the storms was varied and unpredictable. Most showed common sense, abandoning their vehicles and diving into ditches, for instance. Others responded to the mistaken convictions of the period. (Open the windows to relieve pressure inside the house.) Others were hardly less than astonishing. A woman is packed with her family in the living room, watching a snowy TV screen on which the announcer is issuing a warning. The storm rages outside. The house begins to creak, the power goes out, and the danger is immanent. But she doesn't want to take her family into the shallow pit beneath the house because it's only lined with dirt, unfinished, and there's usually a puddle of filthy water in it. So the family retreats to an inside hallway and weathers impact. Better to take a chance on dying that to get dirty.So the narrative skips around from person to person and place to place, but I didn't mind it that much. Levine provides so many back stories of the individuals involved that he gives us almost a tribal ethnography of the good folks of Limestone County. It may look extraneous but it's informative padding. You get to know quite a bit about what it's like to live around here in Limestone County, where everybody seems to know everybody else.The techniques of journalism have their limits though -- lots of data without much attempt at interpretation. In the 50s, an anthropologist, Anthony F. C. Wallace, wrote a book, "Tornado in Worcester," about the Massachusetts storm. It was far less dramatic, and you got to know little about the people of Worcester. But Wallace organized his disaster-related data in diachronic stages. If I remember, they went like this. (1) A steady state in which people go about their business; (2) Threat, as when a tornado or severe thunderstorm "watch" is issued; (3) Warning, as when you see the disaster actually approaching; (4) Impact, during which you are stuck; (5) Isolation, in which people are cut off from the outside world and seem to think they were the only victims; (6) Rescue, in which the agents of aid arive; (7) Recovery; and (8) A New Steady State in which people go about their business again, only a little differently this time.An organizational scheme like that might have helped our understanding of the way an entire community responds to disaster, although it would of course deal less with the suffering of individuals and their families. Of course Wallace couldn't entirely avoid some personal observations. The Worcester survivors aren't going to treat thunderstorms the same way again. As one put it, "There's a fear you can't conquer." I'll also mention in passing an article comparing responses to tornadoes in Alabama and Illinois by Sims and Baumann that appeared in the journal "Science" in, I think, 1972. These kinds of systematic approaches don't make Levine's study less interesting or less valuable. They just add to our understanding of the event. Too bad Levine didn't have Wallace by his side.I'm not quite finished with the book but I'm finding it educational, in a broad sense, and evocative. I only hope that it doesn't bring back the tornado nightmares that plagued my slumber for years after that experience in central Indiana in 1974. If I'd ever had any doubts about some of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, they were dispelled.

This book arrived quickly, easily, and I was so impressed with how clean the book was. It was basically new - I couldn’t see any signs of use inside or outside. Absolutely excellent experience for a book that isn’t always easy to locate in good shape.

The book is ok. It’s written quite well and sets up some characters nicely. The issue for me is sometimes i’ll be reading about tornado damage, and then after that there’s 2 pages on a famous baseball game that happened at the same time but isn’t at all relevant to the tornado impact. I get the need to set a sense of the time period but that feels like a distracting deviation from the story. That said it’s very well researched and I don’t think I’ve ever read as detailed a story about Ted Fujita as in this book. (Ted invented the tornado classification system).