Andover's F5: The Tornado That Almost Hit Nuclear Bombers
Near Wichita, Kansas
On the afternoon of April twenty-sixth, nineteen ninety-one, a violent tornado touched down near Clearwater, Kansas, and began the most destructive path in the state's modern history. By the time it reached Andover, it had been rated F five, the maximum on the Fujita scale, with winds estimated at two hundred sixty-one miles per hour.
The storm had already carved through Haysville and eastern Wichita before it crossed McConnell Air Force Base. On the tarmac at McConnell sat ten Rockwell B-One Lancer strategic bombers. Two of them were carrying nuclear warheads. The tornado narrowly missed the aircraft, but it was not gentle with the base: one hundred two housing units and nine major facilities were destroyed or badly damaged, including the base hospital. The cost ran to what would today be more than one hundred thirty million dollars.
Then the tornado reached Andover, a small suburb east of Wichita. It hit the Golden Spur Mobile Home Park and obliterated it. Thirteen people died there in minutes. The tornado injured one hundred sixty-five more in Andover alone. Across the entire forty-six mile path from Clearwater to the Butler County countryside, seventeen people were killed in total and more than two hundred were injured.
The storm was on the ground for an hour and twenty-five minutes. Neighbors described the Golden Spur as simply gone, the pads empty, debris scattered across open fields. Television news footage of the tornado was unusually vivid for the era, shot by storm chasers who had chased it across the plains, and that footage put Andover on the national map of tornado disasters.
The storm is now simply called the Andover Tornado, a name this community carries the way river towns carry flood lines on their walls. When an EF Three struck Andover again in twenty twenty-two, meteorologists noted the eerie parallel. In south-central Kansas, the land remembers the sky.
