And Hell Followed With It-Bonar Menninger

About the 1966 F5 tornado that went through the middle of Topeka, Kansas. Left Joplinesque damage but through a narrower path. People reported seeing a 1959 Pontiac Bonneville floating 100 feet in the air, a car perched in a second story apartment, cases of unopened pop bottles that were completely drained, a VW Beetle lodged in a crotch in a tree, limbs from a Osage orange tree flying down the hallway of a Washburn University building, a 20 foot I beam twisted like a corkscrew and then bent into a horseshoe, another VW Beetle flattened to less than a foot in height and buried under what used to be Rice Hall on the campus of Washburn, a baseball glove that was in one guy's car was found in a front yard though the car doors were closed and the windows unbroken, two men looked out the window on the tenth floor of a building in downtown and saw an entire cottonwood tree outside their window, mannequins from a downtown department store thrown through car windshields, one man was crushed to death by a 10 foot metal culvert dropped on him, one woman got out of the wreckage of her home to see her neighbor walking across the street to check on her-the neighbor had a compound fracture in her left leg with the bone sticking out of the leg but she was unaware of it until it was pointed out to her, a piece of wood the size of a ruler was driven through a porcelain bathtub, a Brittany pup was found in a field 15 miles away and returned to it's owner, a towel driven through an apartment door, a pickup wrapped around a tree so tightly that the tailgate and front bumper overlapped, a brickbat was driven through a car door, and another 20 foot steel I beam carried two blocks and dropped between adjacent two story houses then turned horizontally to shoot through a second floor window: an eight foot fluorescent light fixture was still attached to the beam and the bulbs were unbroken. There were also cases reported where the outlines of where people had taken cover in basements were silhouetted Pompeii like as the only part of the foundation not covered in mud and roofing tar.

The tornado was notable for two things. Topeka city emergency department defied a national Civil Defense decree that civil defense sirens were to be sounded only in the case of nuclear attack and sounded them for the tornado. The relatively small loss of life versus the incredible amount of damage inflicted resulted in a change of policy involving the sounding of civil defense sirens.

Also without this tornado Bill Kurtis would be a practicing lawyer instead of a broadcaster. He had been offered a job in Wichita contingent upon his passing the bar and was only working at WIBW that day as a fill in for a fellow anchorman who wanted to start his vacation a day early. He had figured that a law degree offered a better chance at a high paying job than television work in low and mid markets but a station in Chicago got a hold of footage of his coverage of the tornado and offered him a job anchoring so he took it instead of the bar.