AM car radios seem quaint. But when the twister comes, you’ll want that dial (Kansas)

When I read the Kansas House had overwhelmingly voted in favor of a nonbinding resolution urging Congress to require automakers to place AM radios in new vehicles, I gave a thought to the wind.

No, not that kind of wind.

I mean wind, as in actual weather, the kind of force generated by town-destroying EF5 tornadoes. Twisters are measured on the Enhanced Fujita scale, a yardstick for destructive potential that places EF5s at the top, capable of gusts exceeding 200 mph.

The tornado that destroyed Greensburg, Kansas, in 2007 and killed 11 people was an EF5. So was the one that chewed its way through Joplin, Missouri, in 2011, claiming 161 lives. It was the deadliest twister since the National Weather Service began keeping modern records in 1950. Both storms came in May — Greensburg on May 4 and Joplin on May 22 — and I witnessed the aftermath of each.

Greensburg was reduced to bricks and kindling. About a third of Joplin was destroyed, including the house where my grandmother had lived when I was a child, and in each community the pain was deep. Kim was in Joplin the day the storm struck to see her youngest kid graduate high school — this was a few months before we were married — and as soon as I learned the storm had hit, I threw some things in the Jeep and began the three-hour drive from Emporia. Kim and her children were fine, because they and other graduation attendees had ridden out the storm in a basement on the Missouri Southern campus, but I remember driving into Joplin that night, where some of the dead and injured were still in the streets, fires burned in spots, and the lightning-marbled sky promised continued bad weather.

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