May 11, 1953: The F-Five
Near Waco, Texas
Monday afternoon, May eleventh, nineteen fifty-three. The workday was winding down. People were leaving offices, running errands, heading for cars parked along the downtown streets.
The sky had been unsettled all day, the kind of Texas spring sky that does not reassure. At four ten in the afternoon, an F-five tornado dropped into Waco's downtown. The most powerful category on the scale, with winds exceeding two hundred miles per hour.
It traveled twenty-three miles, from near Lorena through the city center, leaving a path of destruction that would not be sorted through for days. One hundred and fourteen people died. Five hundred and ninety-seven were injured.
One hundred and ninety-six businesses and factories were destroyed. One hundred and fifty homes were wrecked. Debris piled in the streets to a depth of five feet.
In the R. T. Dennis Building alone, thirty people died when the structure collapsed.
The ALICO Building swayed several feet in the wind and survived, its steel frame and mass protecting it from a storm that obliterated everything around it. The Dr Pepper bottling plant, also built of reinforced concrete, came through. Most of the older brick structures downtown did not.
The nineteen fifty-three Waco tornado holds the grim distinction of being the first tornado in the United States to receive an official F-five rating. It ranks as one of the eleven deadliest tornadoes in American history, and it tied the record for the deadliest in Texas. Out of the wreckage came change.
The disaster prompted the state of Texas to develop the Texas Radar Tornado Warning Network, with twenty radar facilities deployed across the state. Waco's catastrophe, in other words, gave the rest of the country a reason to build the warning systems that protect people from storms today.
