When you tell people you're expecting a baby, there are two typical responses. "Now you'll see," said my mother and my maternal grandmother. This prophecy of doom has yet to bear out, though I suspect they were referring to the teenage years.
Tornadoes destroy Midwest towns, kill dozens
Massive thunderstorms, predicted by forecasters for days, threw off dozens of tornadoes as they raced Friday from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes. Twisters crushed blocks of homes, knocked out cellphones and landlines, ripped power lines from broken poles and tossed cars, school buses and tractor-trailers onto roads made impassable by debris.Weather that put millions of people at risk killed at least 37 in four states — Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio — but both the scale of the devastation and the breadth of the storms made an immediate assessment of the havoc's full extent all but impossible.
Marysville and Henryville, Ind., were all but destroyed.
In Kentucky, the National Guard and state police headed out to search wreckage for an unknown number of missing. In Indiana, authorities searched dark county roads connecting rural communities that officials said "are completely gone."
In Henryville, the birthplace of Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Colonel Harland Sanders, volunteers pushed shopping carts full of water and food down littered streets, handing supplies to anyone in need. Hundreds of firefighters and police zipped around town, where few recognizable structures remained; all of Henryville's schools were destroyed. Wind had blown out the windows of the Henryville Community Presbyterian Church and gutted the building.
