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THURSDAY, APRIL 5, 2012
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
WEATHER
Evaluating damages in Texas
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Ashley Quinton walks through the tornado damaged home of her friend Sherry Enochs in hopes of finding personal items that can be salvaged in Forney, Texas. Enochs was babysitting three children, all under the age of 3, who survived the storm with only minor burns and scraps.
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Mitraculously, no one was seriously hurt.
FORNEY, Texas — As a twister bore down on her neighborhood,
Sherry Enochs grabbed the three young children in her home and hid in her bathtub. The winds swirled and snatched away two of the children. Her home collapsed around her.
Enochs, 53, stood Wednesday amid the wreckage of what was once her home in the North Texas city of Forney, among the hardest hit by a series of tornadoes that barreled through one of the nation's largest metropolitan areas a day earlier. No one was reported dead, and of the more than 20 injured, only a handful were seriously hurt.
"If you really think about it, the fact that everybody who woke up in Forney yesterday is alive today in Forney, that's a real blessing." Mayor Darren Rozell said.
The National Weather Service is investigating the damage caused by the tornadoes, which appeared to flatten some homes and graze others next door. The twisters jumped from place to place, passing many heavily populated areas overhead and perhaps limiting what could have been a more damaging, deadly storm. Most of Dallas was spared the full wrath of the storms.
While tornadoes can strike major cities, having two major systems strike a single metropolitan area is highly unusual, meteorologist Jesse Moore said. The Texas twisters would have done more damage had they stayed on the ground for more of the storms' path. But weather experts and officials credited the quick response to tornado warnings for preventing deaths or more injuries.
In the Diamond Greek subdivision where Enoch's home was destroyed, residents put on work gloves Wednesday and began cleaning up. Many noticed things in their front yards that didn't belong to them.
Enochs doesn't have a clear memory of exactly how things happened Tuesday, but she was
found holding her grandson in the bathtub, which had blown into the area where her garage once was. A 3-year-old she was watching was found wandering around the backyard. A neighbor pulled another child Enochs had been taking care of, 19-month-old Abigail Jones, from the rubble.
"I heard the rumbling from the tornado and I didn't even hear the house call" Enochs said.
Abigail was taken to the hospital but released. The blonde, smiling child with bows in her hair was bruised on her cheek and forehead, but not seriously hurt. Her mother, Misty Jones, brought her back Wednesday to see what had happened.
Seven people were injured in Forney, none seriously. An additional 10 people were hurt in Lancaster, south of Dallas, and three people in Arlington, west of Dallas.
National Weather Service crews in Forney, east of Dallas, spotted storm damage that suggested the twister there was an EF3, with wind speeds as high as 165 mph. Other tornadoes in Arlington and Lancaster appear to have been EF2
tornadoes, with wind speeds up to 135 mph. Tornadoes can range from EF0, the weakest, to EF5, the strongest. An EF2 or higher is considered a significant tornado.
A twister can hit one spot and continue for miles before touching down again, Moore said. It's difficult to explain why a tornado touches down when it does.
"It can destroy one house and the one across the street is fine. It can go back up for a mile or two and drop back down," Moore said. "That's all the crazy things that can happen with tornadoes."
Randy McKeever and his wife and several of their friends sorted through what was left of their house Wednesday. Their roof was completely gone. The front yard was littered with shingles and pieces of wood. Inside was a jumble of belongings. McKeever, 47, wore work gloves as he tried to find anything that could be salvaged.
"There's a bunch of stuff in there that's not even ours" he said.
Stunning video from Dallas showed big-rig trailers tossed into the air and spiraling like footballs. An entire wing of an Arlington nursing home crumbled. In
Lancaster, dozens of young children cowered in the safe room of a day care near a local church. The storm pulled one of the walls back "like you were peeling an orange," day care director Danita Harris said.
"Not one Band-Aid had to be applied." Harris said.
The students were moved further indoors and rode out the rest of the storm safely, she said.
Hundreds of flights into and out of Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and Dallas Love Field were canceled or diverted elsewhere Tuesday. American Airlines, which operates most flights at the airport, said it canceled more than 400 flights Wednesday after stopping about 800 Tuesday. An airport spokesman said more than 110 planes were damaged by hail.
April is typically the worst month in a tornado season that stretches from March to June, but Tuesday's outburst suggests that "we're on pace to be above normal," said National Weather Service meteorologist Matt Bishop.
Gov. Rick Perry plans an aerial tour of the damage on Thursday.
POLITICS
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In this Jan. 22, 2011 file photo, former Democratic presidential nominee and U.S. Sen. George McGovern arrives for the funeral Mass for R. Sargent Shriver McGovern. 89 was hospitalized in Florida on Wednesday, April 4.
Former senator is now hospitalized
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SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — Former South Dakota senator and Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern has been hospitalized in Florida, his daughter said Wednesday.
Ann McGovern told The Associated Press her 89-year-old father was admitted to Flagler Hospital in St. Augustine, Fla., on Tuesday evening for tests to figure out why he occasionally passes out and loses his ability to speak, she said.
"He's comfortable. The tests are continuing to see if they can determine what's causing this," Ann McGovern said.
Hospital officials said the elder McGovern is in stable condition.
McGovern splits his time between Florida and South Dakota, where he was a South Dakota congressman from 1957 to 1961 and a U.S. senator from 1963 to 1981. He has been hospitalized several times in recent months.
In October, he was treated for exhaustion in Sioux Falls after he completed a lecture tour. Two months later, he fell and hit his head in Mitchell, S.D., just before
he was to be interviewed live on C-SPAN for a program called "The Contenders" that focused on failed presidential candidates who had a lasting impact on American politics.
McGovern lost in a historic landslide his 1972 challenge against President Richard Nixon, who eventually resigned amid the Watergate scandal.
McGovern regularly spends time at a home he owns in Mitchell, across the street from a library bearing his name at Dakota Wesleyan University. He also has owned a home in St. Augustine since the 2008 death of his wife, Eleanor.
He and former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, a Republican, were honored that year with the World Food Prize, a distinction some observers have called the Nobel Prize for hunger. Their George McGovern Robert Dole International Food for Education and Nutrition Program, which was established in 2000 and funded primarily through Congress, provides millions of meals to children in the U.S. and some three dozen countries across the world.
LEGAL
The 'Merchant of Death' faces at least 25 years in prison
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NEW YORK — A former Soviet officer dubbed the "Merchant of Death" for his reputation for putting deadly weapons into the hands of violent dictators and regimes is set for sentencing Thursday.
Viktor Bout, 45, faces a mandatory minimum of 25 years in prison and possibly life for his conviction on terrorism charges. His lawyers are making a last-minute bid to convince a judge that the case should be tossed out, along with last year's jury verdict. They say he is the victim of a vindictive U.S. government sting operation.
But in a sentencing memorandum, federal prosecutors urge a
life prison sentence for Bout, saying his conviction stemmed from his willingness "without hesitation and with frightening speed" to ship "a breathtaking arsenal of weapons," including hundreds of surface-to-air missiles, machine guns and sniper rifles along with 10 million rounds of ammunition to men he believed represented a foreign terrorist organization willing to kill Americans in Colombia.
They say that his weapons fueled armed conflicts in some of the world's most treacherous hot spots, including Rwanda, Angola and the Congo and that he was looking for new arms deals in places like Libya and Tanzania when he was arrested.
Lawyers for Bout, who was the
inspiration for an arms dealer character played by Nicolas Cage in the 2005 film "Lord of War," say their client became a political prisoner after Drug Enforcement Administration agents coaxed him from his Russian home to Thailand, where he was arrested in March 2008. They say the charges stemmed from a make-up scenario to deliver weapons to rebels in South America to shoot down American helicopter pilots.
"The relentless pursuit of Viktor Bout and the abominable design to create a criminal case against him that brings him before this court for sentencing is the product of malice and object of private politics stemming from the then White House," defense attorney Albert Dayan wrote in a letter to U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin, a judge who recently ordered Bout moved from solitary confinement into the general prison population.
his way through negotiations for a $15 million to $20 million arms deal so he could sell two shoddy cargo planes for $5 million to U.S. government operatives. He said the operatives followed a well scripted dialogue of anti-Americanism that would whip American jurors into "a blind rage ... and ultimately to conviction."
"The prosecution resulted from 'outrageous, inexcusable government conduct."
Dayan said Bout's conviction culminated a plan put in motion
Dayan said his client faked
Dayan said the prosecution resulted from "outrageous, inexcusable government conduct" to get his client even after Bout rebuffed the first approach by U.S. operatives by saying the Russian government had ordered him to withdraw from any illegal arms deals.
ALBERT DAYAN Defense Attorney
by the U.S. to avenge the embarrassing revelation that U.S. military contractors had arranged in late 2003 with Bout-owned or Bout-controlled companies to deliver tents, food and other supplies for U.S. firms working for the U.S. military in Iraq.
The deliveries occurred despite United Nations sanctions
The lawyer noted that the U.S. Treasury Department
imposed against Bout since 2001 because of his reputation as a notorious illegal arms dealer, Dayan said.
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imposed its own ban on dealings with Bout in July 2004, citing in part the "unproven allegation" that Bout made $50 million in profits from arms transfers to the Taliban when Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida were based in Afghanistan.
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Federal prosecutors said the government initiated its investigation in 2007 because Bout "constituted a threat to the United States and to the international community based on his reported history of arming some of the world's most violent and destabilizing dictators and regimes."
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"Although Bout has often described himself as nothing
In this Tuesday Nov. 16, 2010 file photo, Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout is shown in U.S. custody after being flown from Bangkok to New York in a chartered U.S. plane. The ex-Soviet officer turned arms dealer faced a mandatory minimum of 25 years in prison at sentencing Thursday, April 5.
more than a businessman, he was a businessman of the most dangerous order," prosecutors said in their memo. Transnational criminals like Bout who are ready, willing and able to arm terrorists transform their customers from intolerant ideologues into lethal criminals who pose the gravest risk to civilized societies."
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