Wallace Akin was two years old when the Tri-State Tornado picked up his house-with he and his mother inside-and dropped it atop two other collapsed buildings. Across town, his father lay unconscious near his auto shop, close to death, and Akin's brother managed to crawled from beneath the collapsed shop. All survived. Many others were not as fortunate: Earlier that afternoon, a supercell thunderstorm had spawned a tornado so deadly that it set records against which we still measure all other tornados. The storm ripped through southeast Missouri, southern Illinois, and southwest Indiana, killing 695 people and wounding 2,000, in a record-breaking 219-mile, 3-hour path of destruction. His hometown was the worst hit, losing 243 people to the tornado.
Using first-person accounts from his family and neighbors, newspaper stories, and diaries, Akin offers a blow-by-blow account of the storm from its first sighting to its final minutes. He also attempts to explain how it began-and how it changed his life.
As a young adult, Akin realized that the weather service could have warned its victims; research on tornado prediction had ceased for no apparent reason. This, combined with his upbringing in a town traumatized by weather, led him to choose a career in geography, specializing in climate. In The Forgotten Storm, he explains in clear language why tornadoes happen and how modern man may be making these storms more severe and more frequent. The result is a book both thrilling and horrific, renowned for its ability to touch people's lives by allowing forgotten tales of heroism and personal loss to come spiraling to the surface, one that adds to our understanding of the battle between man and nature.
