Appalling Hurricane at St. Louis.
THE ST. LOUIS Republican of Thursday morning publishes the following particulars of the terrible tornado which visited East St. Louis on Wednesday afternoon. It says: THE OUTBURST OF THE TORNADO.
A few minutes past 3 o’clock the awful visitation opened its fury without a moment’s warning, blowing from the south-west, coming up the river in a diagonal line, inclining eastward in its advance—a terrible whirling force, compacted in a path of about 600 or 800 feet wide, and rushing onward with a roar like an angry sea, and the velocity of a bird’s flight. At another time perhaps it will be possible to collect particulars of the coming of the tempest; but yesterday hardly a witness could be found who could give a coherent statement. They all seemed to think that it smote the earth as with a sudden blow, and they knew not that it was coming until it was upon them. They did not see it coming, but only felt its awful seizure. The tornado seems to have barely touched our southern limits, but to have kept east of the city; and no very alarming damage was done until it struck East St. Louis. Here it manifested its dreadful power, within a space of three minutes, in a manner never before equaled in this part of the country, and almost indescribable. Let the reader imagine an irresistible air-torrent rushing against the frail, artificial structures of man, situated on an exposed river bank. In a moment the air is filled with splinters, dust, and fragments of all kinds. Houses, sheds, and other structures, disappear as if leveled by the blow of a Titan, or fly to pieces and are borne along in the stream of the storm. The East St. Louis elevator was the first edifice struck on the Illinois shore, a strong frame building. The roof was torn to ribbons, and a large portion of it, like a black meteor, shot northward and fell far away in the river. Then came the destruction of other houses; some were unroofed, and some were rent to pieces, walls and all, and the unhappy inmates buried in the ruins. The stately steamer Mollie Able, lying at the East St. Louis wharf, had her texas blown off and hurled into the river. The bridge tug Hewitt had her wheel-house disposed of in the same way, and became a wreck. The whole forest of framework over the east abutment pier of the bridge was twisted up like a bunch of reeds in the fingers of the storm, and crashed down in a pile of chaotic ruin. Railway cars and engines were dashed down on their sides or whirled off the tracks as if they were paper boxes. Whole trees were either struck to the earth, as if the trunks had been severed by a cannon shot, or lifted bodily and carried yards away from where they a moment before stood. Put all these destructions together, and a hundred others; fill the air with a maze of whirling objects, and imagine a sky as black as ink, seamed every moment with tongues of lightning, and reverberating with thunder crashes, while there is a steady roar of a great rushing on earth; and some idea may be gained of the outburst of the tornado on East St. Louis. It was an awful scene—one never to be forgotten. The very suddenness was terrible. Here, a moment before, business of all kinds was in progress; and now the whole population is shivering aghast, while turmoil, and destruction, and great noises, rage all around them on all sides, mingling with which is the piteous cry of the agonized sufferers, caught between timbers or pressed beneath weights that crush them to death. So swift, so sudden, so short, was the storm, that it seemed like the passage of some enormous invisible missile, dragging ruin in its train.