In that swath of the American flatland that has been so brutalized of late, a 93-year-old woman gave me a warning. She had lost her house as a little girl, a homestead property of timber-sheltered memories that shattered in a twister’s strike and took to the Oklahoma sky.

She had cautioned me to be wary of springtime — glorious days in a glorious stretch of prairie that can turn deadly on a dime. “Don’t get too far from a shelter.” Yes, yes, I’d heard plenty about hail the size of grapefruit and how the weather might kick up four things that could kill you — wildfire, blizzard, flash flood, tornado.

But it seemed quaint to these urban ears, a “Wizard of Oz” artifact from Dorothy’s pals on the farm. What I learned that afternoon in Tornado Alley is that nothing is more terrifying than a sky of robin’s-egg blue turning bruised and churlish, a moment that transforms trees and telephone poles into missiles.

The spring of 2011 is shaping up as one for all the wrong kind of records. Flooding, twisters, Texas wildfires, deaths by fast-moving air that has its own awful category known too well by millions — the Enhanced Fujita Scale, the worst being EF5, winds 200 m.p.h. or more. In a year when almost 500 Americans have died from tornadoes, and 60 or more twisters touch down in a single day, even the cable weather jockeys look humbled as they stand next to flattened neighborhoods.

April and May are the cruelest months, when systems and seasons collide, warm moist air at the surface meeting drier air higher up. Brewing, building, these tornadoes develop out of rotating thunderstorms called supercells.

For an outsider, when the radio suddenly goes into emergency broadcast mode and clouds bleed a ragged black, there is an instant that technical talk turns to terror. You feel exposed in a naked land. You feel a target. You think nothing is permanently anchored. You look for an overpass. You understand, somewhat, what it must have been like in wartime London when the sirens went off in advance of another bombing by the Germans. You feel helpless.

Read the rest of Egan's incredible column HERE which continues into his take on the American condition. The number of tornado fatalities in the U.S. keeps climbing with many missing.  Sadly, fifteen states, led by Texas, are looking to overturn the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health.

His column on American politics and life as seen from the West Coast appears in the New York Times on Fridays.

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