Mary's tornado

So after my post about tornado alley, Mary sent me an email with links to photos from the tornado that destroyed her grade school. Here are some links and her notes:

Fascinating NOAA site where they take apart bad weather and try to figure out how they could have predicted it better. My two favorite parts (being only slightly macabre) is the section on victims where they take the time to humanize them ("She had just been married on Saturday, May 10th"), and the fact the Dr. Fujita himself came to town afterwards to do an assessment. It was an F3 until it hit my school.

This was our gym. It's upside down in this picture. The near roof behind is the defunct high school, and the far roof is the church, which only had roof damage. The stained glass windows somehow made it through intact.

This is a color picture of the upside-down gym. In the back of it to the right you can see what's left of the school. (For perspective, the church is now far to the left and not visible. The building you see to the left is the defunct high school, which survived and became the new elementary school. The old elementary school became a playground.)

Fresh out of the 70's, but not yet part of the go-go 80's, Kalamazoo people wander the streets wishing they lived in a city with a nicer downtown so there'd be something to loot.