Indiana Tornado 2012

Indiana Tornado 2012, The tornado came at the worst possible time for the hundreds of students loaded on school buses, ready to head home in Henryville, Ind.

There was no time to follow the preferred safety plan and herd students off the bus and inside the school. Instead, an assistant principal signaled drivers to go, setting off a desperate race to beat the tornado that was just minutes from slamming into the town and destroying a large part of the school.

Unlike snowstorms or hurricanes, which come with plenty of advance warning, tornadoes pose unique challenges for school districts because they can pop up suddenly, leaving little time to scramble to safety. School officials say the choice usually boils down to dismissing class well in advance or sheltering students in the school until the bad weather passes. Neither is guaranteed to save lives.

“When you look at the fact that the average amount of time from a tornado warning being issued to a tornado touching down is five to seven minutes, you can’t get them to a safe place in that amount of time,” said Bob Roberts, emergency management coordinator for Tulsa Public Schools in Oklahoma.

In Henryville, what seemed like bad timing turned out to be fortunate. Despite harrowing encounters that forced one driver and students to duck into a crawl space and another to seek cover with children on the floor of a car, all the students survived back-to-back tornadoes that devastated the town about 20 miles north of Louisville, Ky.

“The very hallways we would have had those kids in, the ceiling collapsed. Those kids would have been crushed,” said John Reed, assistant superintendent of West Clark Community Schools.

But canceling school every time there’s a tornado watch isn’t practical, since some areas have daily thunderstorms, and many storms never develop actual tornadoes.

“In Kansas in the spring, you would never have school,” said Mike Nulton, superintendent of the North Lyon County School District in Kansas, who has been in charge of two schools hit by tornadoes.

Indiana Tornado

Indiana Tornado, The region’s deadliest outbreak of tornadoes in nearly 40 years carved a path of destruction through Indiana and Kentucky on Friday, killing at least 24 people and leveling several small towns.

The National Weather Service estimated 10 or more tornadoes touched down in the two states, spreading chaos through the region. Death tolls climbed throughout the day and well into the evening as crews searched for victims.

Kentucky declared a state of emergency, and Indiana officials said they were discussing doing so late Friday night.

Robert Szappanos, a meteorologist with the weather service in Louisville, said the “super outbreak” resembled the historic 1974 tornadoes, when 63 people died in an area stretching from Southern Indiana to Southern Kentucky.

The weather service will send out teams today to determine exactly how many tornadoes struck the region and their intensity, he said.

But the destruction they left in their wake will take much longer to gauge.

In the town of Chelsea in Jefferson County, Ind., first responders found a 4-year-old boy and his great-grandparents lying on the ground 50 feet from where the elderly couple’s home was blown off its foundation and thrown more than 100 feet.

The child’s young father could be seen crying as he bent over next to a firefighter.

All three died of multiple blunt-force injuries, according to David Bell, the county’s Emergency Management director.

A man who lived nearby on Jackson Road also was killed when the storm slammed into his home, Jefferson County Sheriff John Wallace said.

The victims’ names were being withheld pending notification of relatives, Wallace said.

“All of this happened in less than 30 seconds,” said Cory Thomas, a Hanover volunteer firefighter, who was sitting in a firetruck watching and videotaping the funnel cloud as it moved from the north to the intersection of Ind. 62 and Jackson Road.

Michelle and Daniel Cartwright, whose parents lived at the intersection, rushed from their home to his parents’ house to help his grandmother during the storm. They whisked her to the basement and heard a tremendous roar as the storm bore down on the house, Michelle Cartwright said.