Purple Sky Alerts ‘Tornado Alley’ : Texas: The state averages 118 tornadoes yearly, some minor, others devastating.

There is a strange stillness before a tornado hits, as if all the creatures know to lie low and wait. In this stretch of north and central Texas called Tornado Alley, everyone knows this basic fact and a few others as well.

They know it is best to hide in rooms without windows, better to lie in a ditch than remain in a car. Even nursery-school students have regular tornado drills.

When the threat of tornadoes is a way of life, each spring brings the most terrible possibilities. In certain communities and towns, there are storm-scarred neighborhoods with telltale newer homes nestled among the surviving older models, unexpected vacant lots, patches of young, comeback trees. In Lancaster, a Dallas County town swept up in a deadly April 25 funnel cloud, signs still stand directing visitors to a historic town square that, except for the twisted ruins, no longer really exists.

During any year, Texas endures an average of 118 tornadoes, some so minor that they only disturb a few cows, others historic in their devastation and loss. In some places, nearly everyone has a tornado story, tales of “will-I-live-or-die?” terror and unforgettable violence. Never again will a tornado survivor look at the gathering clouds as an innocent thing.

“Let me tell you, I prayed, I definitely did--’Lord, please, please help me,’ ” said Van Smith, 55, who cowered in a bathroom May 13 when a tornado heaved the roof off the Marble Falls car dealership where he works as service manager. “It was the most helpless feeling. I wanted to get out of the building, but I sure didn’t want to go outside either.”

Texas weather can be tricky. Conditions can change with an amazing swiftness--the sky taking on a dark opalescence, its mountainous purple clouds illuminated with an eerie glow. The willowy mesquite trees and the spring wildflowers--primrose and paintbrush and the last of the bluebonnets--seem to quiver in the hastening wind. And in the tornado towns, the sirens warn: Take shelter.

The turbulent region known as Tornado Alley extends along the eastern edge of the Great Plains from Iowa to Texas, and although Nebraska and Kansas experience more tornadoes per square mile, the vast expanses of Texas record a greater total of twisters each year than any other state. In a single memorable day in September, 1967, Hurricane Beulah spawned a record-breaking 67 tornadoes.

Just last Thursday, a flurry of twisters tore through central Texas, cutting a broad swath between Waco and Austin. At least five touched down, authorities said, doing the most damage in Lometa. At least 15 people were injured and the town’s only fire station was severely damaged. Other buildings were destroyed.

Geography dictates these storms--the powerful flow of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico combining with colder air from the eastern Rockies. “You get a very strong temperature contrast between north of the front and south. Amarillo can be 30 degrees while central Texas is 80--which typically causes severe weather,” explained Wayne Tschirhart, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Austin. “In the springtime, we get these fronts that will stall in West Texas, and the storms form along the front--form and move, form and move.”

Texas springtimes are filled with deadly tornado days: In Goliad on May 18, 1902, 114 people were killed in a four-minute twister, buried by their survivors in one long deep trench. In Waco on May 11, 1953, another 114 people perished as buildings were lifted by their foundations and flung back to earth in masses of brick and timber and glass; downtown Waco has never fully recovered. On May 11, 1970, 26 people died in the Lubbock tornado; on April 10, 1979, 46 died in Wichita Falls. Fifteen years later in this North Texas city of 100,000, each menacing evening cloud, each new report of a twister elsewhere, triggers the most painful flashbacks and the special empathy of one tornado victim for another.

“You always feel what they’re going through, because you know just how awful it is,” said Shirley Lipscomb, a motel clerk in Wichita Falls, where the five tornadoes in that single evening demolished one-third of the city, left 20,000 people homeless and produced $300 million in damage.

During the May 13 twister in Marble Falls, a town of 4,000 about 40 miles west of Austin, observers reported that the black cloud racing toward them from the southwest was streaked with a strange shade of green. Sobbing shoppers huddled in the dark center of the local Wal-Mart as their cars tumbled about in the parking lot.

At the car dealership across the highway, Van Smith heard a low moan after he reluctantly emerged from his hiding place. One of his mechanics was buried under a pile of ceiling debris and fluorescent lighting. “I saw something wiggle and pulled him out,” Smith said. “He was still about half-silly. He didn’t know where he was.”

Outside lay an eerie landscape of overturned vehicles, strewn trees and pink insulation material scattered about like giant wads of cotton candy. Remarkably, no one was killed. “There was a real strange kind of whitish-glow all around,” Smith recalled. “There was little pea-sized hail. It was little, but there was so much of it, it was stacked up 18 inches around the building. And it was real quiet. You couldn’t even hear a bird.”

Living through springtime in Tornado Alley has given residents a certain pluckiness. Roofers are busy in Lancaster, a city of 22,000, and plans are under way to re-create the town square. Most of the businesses in Marble Falls reopened the next day, with large sheets of plastic patching blown-away walls. In Wichita Falls, an interfaith ministry was born of the tragedy that is active in helping the homeless to this day.

Still, Van Smith says he knows he is different now--he will never again gaze cavalierly at the sky as if it holds no grave dangers. “I’ll watch it like a hawk,” he said.

And he will watch it as Texas enters its next big engagement on the weather calendar: Coming June 1 through Nov. 1, the hurricane season.