19531776 Club
F5 tornado strikes downtown Waco; 114 dead and hundreds buried under brick rubble
The bluffs along the Brazos were long said to make the city untouchable, a belief traced to the Huaco people, but the twister forms northwest of Lorena at 4:10 p.m. and tracks straight into the heart of town.
Waco, Texas, had long operated under a comfortable assumption: the bluffs along the Brazos River made the city immune to serious tornadoes, a belief traced — without evidence — to the local Huaco people. At 4:10 p.m. on May 11, 1953, an F5 tornado formed northwest of the Lorena community and tracked directly into downtown Waco, killing 114 people, injuring 597, and burying survivors under five feet of brick rubble for fourteen hours or more. The geography, it turned out, had never been protection at all…
