Is Dorothy’s nightmare decreasing?
Staff writer
When a tornado slammed into his farmhouse March 2, 1970, Warren Windsor and his wife, Donna, ran to their two children, sleeping upstairs. The door to the stairs was jammed.
He yanked it open, and saw sky. He raced up the steps to the room of his son, Randy, 12.The roof was gone. His son was not there.
“My wife fainted,” recalled Windsor, now 89, of Peabody.He turned and hurried to the other bedroom. There, huddled with his sister Elaine in her bed, was Randy.
“I had no idea what it was,” Randy Windsor recalled. He has stayed on his father’s farm and now, at 68, farms it with his daughter. “Things were happening, and something was hitting the house. I just started running.”
Tornadoes are woven into the fabric and lore of Kansas. The state has long been at the heart of “tornado alley,” a swath through the Great Plains where tornadoes historically swarm.
Now, researchers contend tornado alley is moving away from Kansas. They see an increase in twisters in states to the east and in the southeastern United States. Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and Iowa all have seen significantly more tornadoes this year than usual.
Kansas, meanwhile, is quieter. There were 32 tornadoes in the state last year, the second lowest since 1989, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In the first decade of this century, most years saw more than 100 tornadoes in Kansas. Since, only four years have exceeded that number.
Marion County has seen two large tornados in the last 75 years—in 1970 and 1990. Since 1990, it has had 30 recorded tornadoes, but all were moderate--with winds of 112 mph or less-- or weaker with winds less than 72 mph.
“That’s fine with me,” Windsor said. His house was wrecked, his barn vanished and more than 100 hogs were lost. “It’s an experience that I sure wouldn’t want to wish on anybody.”
Still, Windsor found grace in the tragedy.
“We were just surprised,” he said, staring into the past while he sat on a recliner in his home. “Next morning there was a bunch of guys up there putting the roof back on. I didn’t even know them. No kidding.
“That’s what I think impressed me as much as anything about that whole experience, is how people just showed up, you know, by truckloads, and they just went to work. It’s something I’ve never forgotten.”
The decline in twisters has been noticed by others in Marion County.
“For a few years, we had a tornado every year,” Maurice “Moose” Meirowsky, 87, said as he sat at Pop’s Diner in Peabody. “There hasn’t been a tornado here for quite a few years.
“The weather forecast is so, so much better now. I think that helps tremendously,” he said.“I don’t know if the danger is less. But I feel more comfortable.”
The theory that tornado alley is shifting eastward was advanced in a 2018 study by two researchers at Northern Illinois University and the National Severe storms Laboratory in Oklahoma.
They produced a map showing a modest decrease in the number of tornados from 1979 to 2017 in the Great Plains including east-central Kansas, and an increase in such storms to the east, notably Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
Other researchers have confirmed the trend, but not all believe it is lasting.
“It depends on who you talk to,” James Cuellar, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Wichita, said. “There’s a debate as to whether there is any real shift, or if it’s an increase in ability to detect” tornadoes.
Radar and satellite observations have greatly improved, and “everybody has a camera in their pocket” he said. “If you go back even 20 years ago, we would not have had the ability to do that.”
There also may be more witness reports of tornadoes and more damage in the more-populous East, he noted.
With the sporadic nature of tornadoes and widely varying numbers each year, trends can be hard to spot in only a decade or two, Cuellar said.
Marion County officials say they are not taking chances. But some towns are struggling with their warning systems.
Marion’s tornado warning system is automatically activated by alerts from the National Weather Service.But on June 9, the alarm activated with no tornado warning, sounded for four minutes, and then stopped and started several times.
The tornado siren in Marion also malfunctioned in July, 2023, when it sounded for 15 minutes when there was no tornado danger.
“It’s confusing,” Mayor Michael Powers said.
Peabody’s sirens were supposed to be triggered by the fire chief through a cellphone app. But when high winds appeared threatening two months ago, the app did not work for 12 minutes.
“It was a bad failure,” Peabody Mayor Bailey Penner admitted.
Peabody has found a new system, he said, but it would cost more than $70,000. While the city contemplates that expense, workers hauled out an old siren donated to the Peabody Historical Museum, and plan to put it on a tall pole to sound the alarm.
In Hillsboro, Police Chief Jessey Hiebert said he has noticed a decrease in the need to sound the town’s 10 tornado sirens.
“It feels like I am doing less weather watching than in past years,” Hiebert said. “In the past, it seemed that every couple weeks we were pulling the furniture up on the patio and sitting behind the computer watching weather.”
Hiebert, who has been on the police force for more than three decades, said he recalled a tornado approaching Hillsboro in April, 14, 2012, just as the Hillsboro High School held its prom.
“We cranked those whistles off and ran them for an hour. I think we burned up a couple of those horns,” he recalled.
Students and chaperones scrambled into the middle school locker rooms for safety. But the approaching tornado lifted and passed over Hillsboro, feeding the lore of the “Hillsboro bubble” that protects the town, Hiebert said.
Even with a shift in storm tracks, a warning system still is important, the police chief said.
“I carry a spare tire and never need it. I feel better being safe than sorry,” he said.
Windsor, in Peabody, reflecting on nearly 90 years of living with Kansas tornadoes, agreed.
“You’re not gonna figure that weather out,” he said. “It’s gonna do what it wants to do.”