Tornadoes are something Kansans face each year, but today people can be much more prepared than in the past.
There have been several changes in tornado predictions, and El Dorado has had a part in that.
The El Dorado Rotary Club heard about these changes and the history of predicting tornadoes from author and meteorologist Mike Smith, who talked to the club during their last meeting.
Smith has been recognized as one of America's most honored weather scientists and founded Weather Data Services, Inc., which is now part of AcuWeather.
Since then he went on to publish a book, "Warnings: The True Story of How Science Tamed the Weather."
"I think you are going to find out something very interesting," he told the Rotary members, "how El Dorado contributed to weather science.
"It is hard to remember today how tornadoes terrorized the U.S. 60 years ago."
He explained the reason so many people died in tornadoes back then was because the Weather Bureau forbid meteorologists from issuing tornado warnings.
In 1948, the Air Force started looking at tornado warnings and tracking conditions that led to tornadoes.
One influential person in issuing tornado warnings was Don Burgess, who was from Oklahoma and saw a tornado touch down when he was a child. That experience led him to want to be a meteorologist.
He saw one of the tornadoes in a line of tornadoes in 1955 that began in Oklahoma and traveled into southern Kansas, with tornadoes hitting Oxford and Udall, both with no warning and at night.
"For an hour and a half Udall lay bleeding and injured until a motorist passed by," Smith said.
That motorist contacted authorities upon seeing the damage to the town and in the light of the next day, they saw that 95 percent of the buildings had been destroyed. Seventy-seven people died in the Udall tornado, with a total of 102 dying from all of the tornadoes that night.
It was two years after than when Joe Audsley saw a tornado heading toward Kansas City and made the decision to issue a tornado warning, despite the ban still on issuing warnings.
Audsley issued the warning despite realizing he would probably lose his job, although that did not happen.
"He issued what is thought of today as the first tornado warning," Smith said.
After that, people demanded warnings, Smith said.
The Weather Bureau also had people wanting to use doplar radar to predict tornadoes.
That is where El Dorado comes into the story.
"The 1958 El Dorado tornado was the first tornado detected by doplar radar," Smith explained.
While it did not predict it, it did detect it.
The design of that radar was impractical though and was taken out of service.
"Much of the '60s were spent putting together laboratories to
understand tornadoes," he continued.
Then in May 1973 in Union City, Okla., a tornado was tracked by two intercept teams and two doplar radars.
"A program began to develop the technology so it could be used nation wide," Smith said.
The person heading up that research was Burgess.
By the 1990s doplar radar was used across the United States.
Smith went on to talk about the May 4, 2007 Greensburg tornado and the similarities between it at the Udall tornado.
"Earlier in the day, KWCH sent three storm chaser teams to western Kansas," he said.
By 6:10 p.m. a tornado watch had been issued and by 8 storms were exploding southeast of Dodge City and moving rapidly.
A tornado warning was issued for Union Pacific in Greensburg and four trains were stopped before coming into the warning area.
According to their schedules, Smith said if the trains had continued, two of them would have been derailed in Greensburg, complicating the clean-up process further.
"The tornado grew to 3/4 a mile in diameter," Smith said.
Then at 9:19 a tornado warning was issued for Greensburg.
The usual procedure was for Greensburg to sound their tornado sirens for a while then turn them off because they were old, but because of the danger of this tornado they sounded them continuously until the power failed.
"There were rotating winds of more than 200 miles per hour," Smith described.
The tornado was spotted four miles to the south of Greensburg at 9:40 p.m. and it hit Greensburg at 9:48.
By 9:52 it was 1.7 miles wide, and Smith said it was nearly perfectly aligned with the 1.7-mile wide town of Greensburg.
He said officials had requested 200 body bags and three refrigerated trucks for the bodies they expected to find after the tornado.
"Udall and Greensburg were as identical as two tornadoes could ever be," he said.
Smith researched the two and showed drawings of the radar echoes of the two storms, which were almost identical in their paths and development.
They were both F-5 tornadoes and both hit at night, with their approach cloaked by heavy rain and hail.
The difference was that in Udall, there were 82 killed and 260 injured out of a town of 505.
In Greensburg, there were 11 killed and 59 injuries out of a town of about 1,500.
Smith said if the Greensburg tornado had occurred in the same time as Udall, when there were no warnings, there potentially could have been 243 fatalities.
He said one year after the tornado President George Bush gave the commencement address at Greensburg graduation and the town has been rebuilding, with a mission to "go green."
"I'm happy to report it's going well," Smith said. "Just this week they opened a new school built partially with lumber from Hurricane Katrina."
He said overall, meteorology has cut the tornado death rate by 95 percent.
