Murmured Thanks in Tornado’s Wake

A nighttime tornado crumpled the tiny business district of this big-hearted town--but when dawn broke Thursday many of its residents looked around and muttered “thank you.”

“This town is so lucky. I can’t believe nobody died,” said Brenda Judd, one of the 50 or so businessmen and women applying brooms, buckets and chain saws to the wreckage of what had been the center of this Eastern Colorado town of 1,800.

Fourteen people were injured and five hospitalized, one seriously, after the tornado paraded almost in a straight line down E Street in the twilight of Wednesday evening.

Clocks stopped at 8:08 p.m. when the hail and winds built. For a few minutes it was exciting fun. Bob Younger and 35 patrons watched the advancing storm from the patio of his Southside Pizza Parlor on the far edge of town.

Great sheets of lightning lit the rolling wheat fields for hundreds of miles in the plain between Denver and Kansas. Then came a bombardment of hail, some pellets almost as big and hard as a cue ball.

The fun stopped when a funnel cloud emerged from the thunderheads above and advanced on Limon. At 200 yards, it swung four Union Pacific freight cars off their tracks. The patrons at Southside Pizza dashed for the basement.

Some people credited an early warning siren for reducing casualties. Others said they never heard the siren over the howl of the wind and the rattle of hail. People here, though, are conditioned to be wary of the fierceness of storms.

Limon is 80 miles east of Denver on Interstate 70. It is best known for two things--wheat and winter. Here is where iron gates close the freeway during blizzards. And Limon is known to countless travelers as a friendly, warm haven for the stranded.

But Limon had never seen anything quite like this.

Those without basements rode out the tornado in all variety of makeshift shelters.

Carl Riley, a guest at Limon’s Lariat Hotel, piled into a bathtub with two other men, and they pulled a mattress over their heads. The changing air pressure of the storm pounded their eardrums painfully.

“It felt like somebody just reached down and squeezed your whole body,” he said.

The community’s grocery store and newspaper were wrecked, the brick walls of its bank elbowed over by the tornado. Perhaps 30 businesses in all were severely damaged or destroyed--the little shops that keep a town together, the beauty parlor, furniture store, five and dime, City Hall and sheriff’s station. There were estimates of damage to 25 mobile homes and perhaps 300 other residences. A number of cars and trucks were destroyed.

The tornado was one of several to touch down in rural Eastern Colorado on Wednesday from a line of severe thunderstorms that moved across from the Rockies.

“It makes a human being humble,” said Gov. Roy Romer, who toured the area Wednesday night and again Thursday. He issued a disaster proclamation and police and National Guardsmen closed off the town to outsiders.

Through it all, though, were those persistent expressions of gratitude.

“Thank God we’re closed on Wednesdays,” said the Limon movie theater’s owner, Larry Steele, broom and dustpan in hand, as he picked up broken glass and ceiling tiles, popcorn and paper cups at the badly damaged theater.