At Least 7 Killed as Storms Cut Destructive Swath in Midwest

The sound came first: a clarion howling that jolted residents awake in their suburban Cincinnati homes as 200 mph tornado winds and storms scoured the Midwest on Friday, killing at least seven people, injuring several dozen more and obliterating hundreds of houses.

As the cyclone vortices scythed wildly in a blackened arc through the city’s northern suburbs, people bolted in a panic from their beds and dashed for shelter in their basements while walls throbbed and windows exploded.

No one saw the funnel clouds as they advanced before dawn. The lucky ones cowered in bathrooms and in crawl spaces until the screaming outside stopped. The unlucky ones died--several inside cars that were flung along rain-swept highways, others crushed inside homes that had pancaked around them.

“Anybody that walked out of here is extremely lucky,” Steve Ashbrook, director of Hamilton County’s search teams, said as he slogged through a subdivision where nearly 50 houses were reduced to mounds of wood, concrete, brick and bent steel beams. More than 200 houses were destroyed throughout the county, authorities reported, and another 200 were damaged along the storm’s violent path through southern Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio.

Vicious Winds Leave Destruction

The lashing winds were as capricious as they were brutal, felling whole tree lines in an instant and yoking thick 150-year-old maples out of the ground from their roots.

Dumbstruck search crews found a boy’s comic book driven into the stump of a fallen tree, its pages embedded 6 inches into the hardwood.

A 10-month-old sleeping in his crib was flung out of his parents’ second-floor bedroom, authorities said, then dropped safely underneath a falling door. Suffering only minor cuts caused by flying debris, Nicholas Stein was treated at Jewish Hospital here, then released along with his bruised parents and 13-year-old brother.

Nicholas was lying on his back, playing with toys, when neighbors found him. “This was just a big party to him,” his amazed mother, Becky Stein, said.

A middle-aged couple in this ravaged township were pitched from their bedroom and flung across the street into a thicket of flattened trees. Their bodies were found near bent, soaked mattresses.

In addition to the four known deaths and nearly three dozen injuries reported in the Cincinnati area, there were two storm-related fatalities reported in Illinois trailer parks and another in Missouri.

Some residents here complained bitterly that they had not heard the keening sirens. The klaxons did sound, authorities insisted, but the wall of wind moved so quickly that many groggy survivors heard the warning just as they were enveloped inside the twister’s swirling fury.

“We barely got downstairs ahead of the wind,” said Patrick Uphius, 21, who followed his mother and younger brother down into the basement of their Montgomery home just as its brick walls imploded. “What freaked us out was coming outside when it was over. You couldn’t hear a thing--no crying, no shouts. We thought we were the only ones left.”

Paramedic Misses His Family’s Terror

His father, Mike Uphius, a part-time county paramedic and retired Cincinnati firefighter, could only gape at how the winds had sliced off the second floor of his home as if it were a layer cake. Its brick walls had flopped over like fragile gingerbread, exposing the family’s unscarred piano and living room furniture, still standing upright.

“Geez,” he kept saying softly. “Geez.”

Uphius had been on an ambulance run to aid a heart attack victim when he heard the report from his battalion chief that a tornado was roaring through Montgomery. He had missed his family’s terror: the screech of the siren drowned out by the wind, the pounding and creaking of a home coming apart.

But on his frantic drive to their home on Cornell Road, Uphius choked on the fears inside him. His wife, Mary, 50, and sons Patrick and 19-year-old Greg were gone when he came upon the shards of his house in the darkness. It was 20 minutes before he found them alive at a nearby high school.

As the sun rose, the Uphiuses saw how the randomness of the air had saved them. Just a few yards from the shell that their house had become was a flattened patch of rubble where Lee and Jackie Cook had lived.

The Cooks, identified by several residents, had been hurtled from their bedroom, across the street and into a collapsed woods. They were found there by searchers, surrounded by tree limbs strewn with mattresses, jogging clothes, wisps of insulation and the crushed hulk of a white sedan. Only their spooked English sheep dog survived, found paddling in debris floating in the Uphiuses’ backyard swimming pool.

“Why them and not us?” Patrick Uphius wondered.

As the day dragged on, survivors returned to sift through the mounds for anything that might be salvaged. One elderly man came up only with some old framed photographs and a rocking chair.

“You take what you can get,” he said kicking at shafts of splintered wood.

Police and search crews combed house to house within an hour after the tornado spent itself in north Hamilton County, which was declared a disaster area later in the day by Gov. Robert A. Taft. Rescuers pulled some survivors from basements and climbed shaking stairwells to lead others to safety.

Montgomery Township police Sgt. Deb Witte was one of the first to arrive, forced to borrow a neighbor’s car because her squad car was blocked by a fallen tree limb. She coaxed a petrified teenager down from a rickety exposed bedroom, then roamed the neighborhood to count the missing. At times, residents walked right by her as she approached them, numb and hollow-eyed by the magnitude of the devastation around them.

“Some of them you had to shake a little bit,” she said. “They just couldn’t believe it, and I can’t blame them.”

The winds that blasted Montgomery and the neighboring townships of Blue Ash and Warren approached a rate of 260 mph at several points along the tornado’s swath, the National Weather Service said.

‘It Appeared to Hop as It Moved’

The Ohio cyclone’s careening 150 mph to 200 mph winds pegged it as a Class F3 tornado, authorities said. But at several moments Friday morning it grew even wilder, becoming a “localized F4” tornado, the most destructive variety known.

Weather service meteorologist Don Hughes said the funnel cloud gathered over southern Indiana near the town of Ripley just after 4:30 a.m., grinding forward in a northeasterly arc. “It appeared to hop as it moved,” Hughes said, explaining that it touched down in several points, battering suburban neighborhoods in the Ohio River town of Addyston.

Tornado klaxons droned in downtown Cincinnati at 5 a.m. as the funnel cloud bore down on Blue Ash.

The winds severed a water main inside a shopping complex there, forcing the pressurized water into a 40-foot-high geyser that soared above the building’s stripped roof. Power lines and telephone poles were snapped all along Cincinnati’s northern rim, temporarily cutting service to 200,000 customers.

Stripping the ground beneath it like an unsheathed razor, the tornado devastated Montgomery, then finally blew out near the town of Loveland.

The storm line finally broke up, meteorologists said, just south of the town of Xenia, the site of one of the nation’s most devastating tornadoes, a storm that killed 33 people and injured 1,600 in April 1974.