[MUSIC] >> I seen a tornado in 1925.

I was at school.

It was recess and they called us in.

We went in the school and we started to propping up the doors and things with chairs.

[MUSIC] And we stood there and watched that tornado come through Murphysboro.

>> The newspaper said Murphysboro has been blown away.

>> When the storm came.

That you've heard people say they sound like a freight train.

That's exactly what it sounded like.

>> I was playing hopscotch with two of my friends.

All of a sudden, the sky became very well to me.

It was a mustard gold.

That's all I can explain.

>> On March 18th, 1925, the United States witnessed the worst tornado disaster in our nation's history.

The Tri-State tornado killed 695 people as it roared out of southeast Missouri shortly after 1:00 in the afternoon.

The 219 mile track of the storm across southeast Missouri, southern Illinois and southwest Indiana is the longest ever recorded in American history.

While never officially rated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Tri-State tornado is widely recognized by most experts as an F5 tornado with winds of over 300mph, the highest rating on the Enhanced Fujita Tornado scale.

>> And an F5 tornado debris is pushed away and it's pushed away from other debris so that if you have a house on a slab, for example, they didn't they didn't back here.

But say you did, there'd be nothing left.

[MUSIC] Just as though a scraper came along and wiped it all out.

Gone.

And these houses just literally exploded.

>> Tornado watch in effect until 9:00 for all of Southern Illinois.

A large part of southeast Missouri.

And this is just the beginning of what I think is going to be a very long.

>> Veteran TV meteorologist Jim Rasor says weather that day was ripe for a tornado disaster as warm Gulf moisture collided with a strong cold front.

>> The reports that we've had, I think the eyewitness reports, maybe even tell us more than than what looking at the charts would.

And we're talking about mid March here in southern Illinois, which which can see wide range of weather conditions.

We're still technically in the tail end of winter.

We know spring is right there.

And we see that whole mix.

And what we heard or what I've heard over and over is that before, just before the tornado came in, the the schoolchildren were out playing in the playground without jackets and without coats.

It was a really nice spring day, so we know we just had an incredibly strong cold front.

It's the old cliche, the clash of of warm and humid air and the cold, dry air coming in.

And this just turned out to be one of those that, that not only created an event, but could sustain an event for hours.

>> The tornado started near Ellington, Missouri, around 1:00.

Two separate funnels were spotted at one point before the storm moved into the bottomlands and headed toward the Mississippi River and merged back into one funnel.

Altogether, it's believed the storm killed 12 people in Missouri before moving into Gorham, Illinois, around 230, obliterating the town where 30 were killed.

The storm was a mile wide in places and reached speeds of over 70 miles an hour.

There was little or no warning for those in its path.

>> 72 miles an hour on the ground in southeast Missouri, which is a world record.

The fastest locomotive of the time could only go about 65.

>> Stand by a highway where cars are going 60 miles an hour, and see just how quickly they close on you, and then look for the car that's on the horizon that just comes over that last little hill where you see them appear and time that that's how much time these folks would have had.

And in some cases, that's probably measured in seconds.

>> If you were in the track of the storm, if it was coming at you, 10% likelihood you would die.

>> The Jackson County seat of Murphysboro was next.

The storm wiped out most of the city except for the extreme southeast side.

The death toll in Murphysboro eventually reached 234.

>> We had no warning at all that a tornado was coming.

We didn't have a television or we didn't have a radio at school.

Then the children ran from the room and joined the children from the upstairs who came down with their teachers.

We all went to the basement.

One of the little boys grabbed me around the waist and he says, Miss Modglin, please take me to my mother.

>> Dark, dark and just.

It looked like if you don't like that, it's a big world, like.

And it was just then the first thing you know, you see nothing but far.

And.

And it started to raining and and it it was, uh, really stormy.

>> Like I was in Lincoln school in the third grade.

And, uh, we had just been out for recess.

When the bells rang.

We thought a little early to come in and I was, as I said, the third grade.

My grade faced the West to the north, and all of a sudden there was a loud thunder.

The windows cracked, blew in my granddaddy.

>> He, uh, he he, uh, was watching the storm see, from the back porch.

And directly he seen when he seen that big funnel while he hollered for my mother and grandmother and little baby sister to get in the cellar.

They had dug a cellar where they kept their, uh, vegetables and stuff, and they just barely got in that cellar.

When that happened hit.

>> And I saw this bad storm and I thought, well, I would go out to another room because I was there by myself.

And by the time I got to the door, I couldn't open the door because the suction was, uh, pressure was so strong.

And so I stayed there by myself, of course, for seconds or minutes.

And then I could not see across the hall because I could tell there was a stairway there and I could just see forms, but I couldn't tell who they were because the hall was so full of dirt and debris.

>> We lived in the southwest part of Murphysboro.

Our home was totally demolished.

Totally.

I had a sister in seventh grade.

I was in fourth, and I had a little brother in second grade, and we were all in Longfellow School.

Of course, the school was demolished.

12 children were killed in that building for all students.

My little brother was one of the 12.

>> De Soto came next, where 56 people died, including 33 children at the De Soto school, the worst school death toll from a storm in American history.

[MUSIC] >> 1 in 4 children who walked to school that morning in De Soto, Illinois, never came home.

[MUSIC] I can't imagine that heartbreak.

[MUSIC] It was a two story affair built in the 1890s of mud bricks, sun dried bricks with no infrastructure, no skeleton to hold it up.

So when the when the winds came and started to knock down the walls, the whole thing just collapsed.

>> We normally have a recess about two 230 in the afternoon, and that day it looks about.

The janitor rang the bell about 15 minutes early, and we lined up on the sidewalk and marched in.

By that time we could see it coming, not knowing it was a tornado.

But also we had outdoor goalposts for outdoor court.

Because the old days, I remember seeing one of those blow down and also a young girl came out of the girls toilet, which was in the northwest corner of the property, and I saw it pick her up.

That's all I saw.

They found her in the fence on the north side of the property.

Dad and her brother was also killed.

>> The storm killed 25 people in rural Franklin County before hitting West Frankfort, where 102 people were killed.

[MUSIC] >> It just looked awful black dark around there, and it was a cloud hanging in the west.

We kept a watch and it was getting so dark, so we were standing up the window.

I was sitting next to the window there on the west side, and all of a sudden we seen things flying through the air, but not close to us, however, but we were up high enough to see it and it was houses and all things going.

>> I couldn't open the door when I got to the door.

The wind was so strong and then things started flying and well, it tore off the roof right at the top of the windows and doors and the whole west side.

There was nothing left of the west side.

And of course, what was left of the rest of the house was just shambles, shambles.

>> Most of the dead were women and children.

Many of the men were working underground in the region's coal mines.

>> But there they were, 500ft underground, and the lights started to flicker.

[MUSIC] And then they went out.

[MUSIC] Of course, they've been trained.

And the boss said, light your lamps, men.

Go ahead and light your lamps.

We're going to climb out of here.

Don't know what's going on, but we're going to we're going to take the ladder safety system and up we go.

And they did, without any forewarning, without any prelude of any kind.

They walked out on a place that looked like a World War One battlefield.

>> Entire families perished in the storm.

The stories of loss are heartrending.

>> Then there's another story, too, of a woman who was sitting in her house with her husband, and the house was picked up, literally picked up, spun halfway around, and landed in an elm tree in their backyard.

So she climbed out of there and couldn't find her husband.

And her husband was lying in a cornfield just over, just over from their house.

And he had a railroad spike in his hip.

And he turned to Alice and he says, Alice, I am dying.

And he did.

>> Many small towns were hit as the storm worked its way to the northeast, including 33 killed in Parish, Hamilton and White counties lost another 45 people in the wake of the twister.

The storm moved into southwestern Indiana, north of new Harmony, where another 99 people died in a series of towns that were struck before the tornado finally roped out and dissipated.

>> Fire broke out all down through the flats and different places.

I know my father in law.

His house burned.

>> All night long.

There was the fires going on and the fear that if it gets any closer, we're going to the river.

We're going to the river.

Now, I don't know what the river would do, but that was the threat that we had.

>> As horrifying as the storm was, the fires in its aftermath claimed a deadly toll in lives.

>> And that the horrible.

>> Part of the story here and in West Frankfort, and to a limited extent in other parts of the story.

[MUSIC] Almost half of the victims died not of smoke inhalation, not of some sort of catastrophic blow of some kind, but they burned to death.

[MUSIC] Disturbing.

This was an era where coal was used to to light the heating in a in a fireplace.

This was also a time when cook stoves, which were ubiquitous.

The electric stove and the natural gas stove was pretty hard to find in 1925, and particularly here.

[MUSIC] So they had they had wood cook stoves, excuse me, coal wood cook stoves.

And of course, when those were upset, the coals would ignite, the kerosene would ignite the boards.

And here these poor guys are trapped literally in a hell.

>> Across the region.

Stunned survivors crawled from the wreckage.

>> And I remember I ran over to the door and braced myself against the door.

That's all I remember until I was down, either in the basement or somewhat below the level of the ground floor.

I wasn't hurt at all.

>> You were pinned in the wreckage.

>> I was pinned in there by I-beam, a beam of wood.

But I was lying on top of the janitor who was Uncle Joe Williams, and he tried to quieten myself down a little, you know, and said, let me pull some bricks out from under me, and that'll let me drop down, and you in turn can drop down and get out.

And that's what happened.

>> Frightened schoolchildren struggle to make their way home.

Their world turned upside down in an instant.

>> We were turned loose.

We were told that on the way home there were live wires.

Wires were down to be careful.

But everything looked strange.

And I know one of my main impressions that I remember going home was a large tree that blocked the sidewalk and the street, and we had to crawl over it.

And I can still remember just seeing part of a leg in a shoe, which must have been under that tree.

The tree limbs.

But not being old enough to really care, you know, I crawled over and went on home.

>> We got to the mines and there lay all that material.

It blew the mines completely down the tip.

And people were saying, watch the wires, don't step on the wires.

That was a hard job getting through that.

So when we got through that, we turned to the road that led where all these people lived.

We all did, and there weren't any homes there.

>> There were desperate attempts to find loved ones.

>> When the tornado struck.

We were fortunate, my sister and I, to find each other.

Dirty, muddy, torn, scratched.

We found each other, but we couldn't find our little brother.

And of course, we began to have our much anxiety about that.

My dad finally, after an hour or so, walked out from town, climbing over the debris and the hot wires and so forth.

He came out with a friend and found us, but could not find his little son.

That was the most heartbreaking thing I've ever experienced.

I've never seen a grown man sob.

>> Good Samaritans drove the wounded to hospitals in nearby Carbondale to Coin and Benton.

The Murphysboro Elks Lodge was pressed into service as a makeshift hospital and morgue.

>> Saint Mary's Hospital over here only had, uh, 29 beds, so needless to say, that filled up in an instant.

So the authorities went around trying to find fraternal orders, particularly this one because of its its size to become a hospital.

[MUSIC] To become a triage center for a possible movement of a patient to a different hospital by train.

But it also acted as a morgue.

>> Funeral homes could barely keep up with the number of victims.

>> The next day.

[MUSIC] I went up to a funeral home.

My uncle went up there, took me up there, and he was going to help him up at the funeral home.

And I went up there and I stood around and watched him.

And, uh, they was bringing him in there just one after another, and they laid him on the floor and every place they could put him.

>> Relief poured in from all over the Midwest in the days following the storm.

Hospital trains transported the injured to cities like Saint Louis and Chicago.

>> I felt it reminded me of doctor J. M Reid, R-E- I-D came down from Chicago and volunteered.

He was an old Army surgeon, and so he operated for 36 hours straight under battlefield conditions, basically is what happened, which he was familiar with from World War Two.

Excuse me.

[MUSIC] So he took a particular liking to a little patient by the name of Evelyn.

[MUSIC] And Evelyn had head injuries very bad.

And she was also suffering from hypothermia.

So she was trapped and in the rain and it got cold.

Got 38 degrees the night after the storm.

So here she was.

And he took a liking to her.

And he, he came back after every operation to check on her.

And how are you doing?

And he fawned over her.

Well, one day he went and she was gone.

[MUSIC] >> There were mass burials.

In the days following the storm.

An ecumenical memorial service was held in Murphysboro with the community, black and white together were united in grief at their common loss.

>> There was a black undertaker brought in from Carbondale to help prepare the dead for burial.

And also there was a memorial service which was requested by Ike Levy of any denomination.

Everybody come.

And the black preacher that served the black community here was one of the speakers that they asked to talk.

>> Many survivors settled in with family, friends and neighbors, while others lived in tents for months as their homes were rebuilt.

>> All summer long, we were without lights.

We lived in a tent.

It wasn't the nicest thing.

>> Pretty primitive, I imagine.

>> A very primitive.

And of course the yards had to be cleaned up because there was glass nails and everything, so you couldn't do a whole lot.

>> Life slowly returned to normal as the cities were rebuilt.

The recovery was slow and never quite complete.

>> You lose so many jobs, that's bound to have an immediate effect and lasting effect on your community.

It's just axiomatic.

If people can't make a living wage, then they will pick up and move, which there's abundant evidence of that happening right here in Murphysboro.

Several reports of that in my book.

Um, so that then is a cascading effect that if you have somebody who's no longer working at the at the rail yard, he has to look someplace else for work.

He looked someplace else for work.

And they're devastated.

They're flattened.

They're not hiring anybody and may never hire anybody.

So that began the de-population of the of the cities.

>> A century later, the storm remains part of the collective consciousness in the Tri-State area and the stuff of legends like two by sixes driven through trees and chickens, plucked clean by the force of the winds.

>> One of the things that I remember, my dad had some chickens.

People had chickens in their backyard.

Then the next morning, the rooster was out crowing.

Not a feather on him, which was another one of the things that you found in the tornado that would have.

>> Plucked him clean, right?

>> It plucked him clean.

>> Another storm of this magnitude is always possible.

>> Right now, on radar, we continue to watch the severe thunderstorms popping up.

Large hail reported in these.

They're showing signs they could be producing very strong winds.

>> Today's meteorologists believe that improved computer technology and forecasting products will give the region citizens a much better margin of warning and improved chances of survival.

>> So the biggest thing for me is that we can just see the potential so much farther down the road now that we can start to get the word out a little bit earlier.

We don't want to cry wolf.

We have to watch the message.

But it's possible to let people know.

And one of my friends that I worked with many years ago and did some research, one of the projects he did while he was at the Storm Prediction Center, he was writing algorithms 20 years ago with the concept that we believe we can program computers to analyze this data with no human human intervention and make these outlooks.

And the ultimate goal was there.

Can we get to a point that we basically have digital warnings?

We're very close to that today, Doppler radar will display a window and say, I think you need to look at this.

You should consider a warning or whatever the advisory might be.

So if we can lean on that and the speed of AI to do a lot of the interpretation for us and then tie that into projection.

We'll just continue to expand the window where we can give more lead time on these warnings.

>> So long as memories are shared from one generation to the next, those of us who call this area home will never forget what we call the storm.

>> When we first started talking before we started rolling the tape.

You said that you knew I was a local.

Why?

Why was that the storm?

Because I referred to it.

>> It's referred to as the storm.

You talk to anyone in Murphysboro who went through this?

[MUSIC] It's the storm when they're talking, not the tornado.

Now, I had to learn.

I was, as I said, in the library, and you didn't see the storm.

You said the tornado.

But you can tell.

>> There can be no other.

>> Storm.

There is no other storm.

You might hear cyclone, But storm.

>> In closing, a personal note from the filmmaker.

[MUSIC] I grew up on stories the storm told by my father, who lived in De Soto in 1925.

He often talked of his 14 year old sister in law from his first marriage.

She was one of the 33 children killed at the De Soto School.

This film is dedicated to the memory of Verna Ford and all those who perished in the Tri-State tornado of 1925.

[MUSIC]