4 Die as Twister Rips Florida Town : College Campus, Homes Battered; 18 Suffer Injuries

A pre-dawn tornado ripped a 12-mile path through this sleeping city on Tuesday, killing four people, injuring 18, leveling two dozen homes and turning a serene college campus into a heap of bricks and soggy paper.

“We can just trash the auditorium; it was twice as tall only yesterday,” said Dr. William H. McCoy, president of North Florida Junior College.

The rear side of the $4-million building looked as if it had been dynamited. “At first, I thought we’d simply move commencement to under the shade of the trees,” McCoy said. “But the trees are gone, too.”

The storm hit Madison at about 4:50 a.m. It staggered through the pine woods like a mean drunk, cutting a swath as wide as 300 yards.

Kills Two at Farm

It killed two at a tobacco farm west of here, then roared on to strike the college.

The tree-lined campus is within a mile of downtown in this city of 3,500--the center of a tobacco and dairy farming area just south of the Georgia border.

“I don’t know how you ever straighten out a mess like this,” said another college official, Ann Quick, walking amid the debris.

The Administration Building lost most of its windows. Hundreds of registration forms and student documents were scattered across the grounds.

The chapel fell in under the weight of uprooted live oaks and pines. A new library, still without books, was flattened. The old library survived, but with a great gash in the center of its roof.

Scoreboard Toppled

A silver maple fell into a corner of the bookstore. The new scoreboard toppled onto the baseball field. The satellite dish behind the Science Building was left floating in a pond.

“It makes me feel like the school life of the whole past year has been destroyed,” said Beth Freeman, a sophomore.

But many lost more than memories. “That old wind left the college, ran through the cemetery, got the Presbyterian church, then headed northeast for murder,” said Police Chief Edward Odom.

In fact, the Grace Presbyterian Church tumbled into itself. Its big white columns plunged through the front door, and the steeple caved in on top of a pile of wood, red brick and yellow fiberglass insulation.

Piano Survives

“We’d have had the building paid for this summer,” Linda Gibson, a member of the church, said. “Maybe they can save the piano. It’s under there, and only the sound board is cracked.”

From the church, the tornado dipped across pasture land and sliced into a neighborhood on the edge of town.

“As soon as I woke up, the windows blew out on both sides of my bed, and the roof came down on top of me,” said Mitchell May, who was pinned in the debris for three hours.

Tommie Tuten, a retired Air Force man, said: “I thought the house was getting hit by huge hailstones. But when I grabbed the flashlight I could see it was pieces of other homes.”

Across the street, Jean Rowe was pelted with craggy chunks of plaster as her ceiling collapsed. A half day later, she was still searching for photos from her brother’s wedding, though grandma’s hope chest had been found--a little cut up but whole.

‘So Much Irreplaceable’

“So much in a lifetime is irreplaceable . . . all of the awards our daughter won in high school,” she said.

When the storm left town, it skipped a patch of woods, then found more homes to knock down in the nearby community of Hickory Grove.

Robert and Lavelle McCullough, two who died, lived in a trailer there. The trailer was lifted off its blocks and carried 200 yards. The couple were dumped to the ground along the way.

“There was so much debris all over, the ambulance couldn’t even get in to get them,” said Karen Williams, a neighbor. “Somebody else had to go in and put them in the back of a pickup.”

College President McCoy said McCullough was a maintenance worker on the campus. “You leave on Monday and . . . when you come back you have lost a very valuable employee. He was going to retire in January,” McCoy said.

‘Not Even a Dish’

Dorothy Butler, Lavelle’s sister, surveyed the spot where the trailer she so often visited had stood. “It didn’t leave any of it,” she said. “Not even a dish.”

The tornado, Florida’s worst since a twister killed 11 and injured 400 in 1966, was part of a storm system that carried high winds and hail throughout much of the Southeast.

Many Georgia cities reported damage. One tornado touched down as far south as Cape Canaveral in central Florida, where four workers were slightly injured near a space shuttle launch pad.

But the storm will be remembered most for what it did to Madison. Florida Gov. Bob Martinez flew to inspect the town and said he would declare it a disaster area to make it eligible for state and federal aid. No precise damage estimates were available Tuesday, but repair of the college alone will require $25 million, Dr. McCoy said.

“This doesn’t look much like a place of learning now,” he said, standing under a sunny sky that seemed to make the destruction less believable. “Who knows how long it takes to start over?”

One police report said a book from the college had been found in Georgia, carried eight miles in the wind across the border, and dropped in the mud of a tobacco patch.