The supercell that caused all that devastation started in Southeast Kansas, touching down first near the Labette and Cherokee county line before dropping south into Oklahoma.

Cox recalls a customer from Grove, Okla., stopping at her Picher burger joint, The Gorilla Cage, and leaving a warning.

“He said, ‘Keep your eyes on the sky, it doesn’t look too hot out there,’ ” Cox said.

Minutes later, members of the Picher Fire Department heard a frantic radio report from a Welch, Okla., volunteer firefighter of a monster twister on the ground, headed for them. At 5:20 p.m., Picher’s tornado sirens went off. Six minutes later, the National Weather Service issued its official warning.

Michael Sweeten, a Picher firefighter/paramedic, took a firetruck to the top of a hill trying to spot the tornado. He was looking for a black funnel, instead, he saw a wall so wide it engulfed everything in sight. Three-quarters of a mile wide, the tornado was on the horizon.

“We got out of the truck, into what we thought was a ditch and got on each side of the tree and held on,” Sweeten said.

Picher Mayor Tim Reeves has seen his share of tornadoes, but said this was different.

“I’ve heard a freight train and it was nothing like a freight train — it was terrible,” Reeves said.

Picher was hit at 5:39 p.m. The twister picked up a car with four people in it. Samuel Don Berry, 20; his wife, Tracie Dawn Berry, 19; her uncle, Darrell Edward Patterson II, 28, of Wagoner, Okla.; and her sister, Kenna Garrison. They were on their way to Samuel’s mother’s home in Miami, Okla., for a Korean dinner. Everyone in the car died, except Garrison, who was thrown clear and somehow survived.

The tornado also killed Mistie Dawn Kelley, 30, and Linda Christine Mathis, 48, in their homes in Picher.

All that damage to a century-old town, all those homes and lives lost, all in three minutes, Reeves said.

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The tornado lost strength near the Oklahoma-Missouri line, dropping to an EF-1 at 5:59 p.m., the smallest tornado possible. But just after entering Missouri, the twister merged with another that had just formed and they grew to a single mile-wide EF-4 monster.

It destroyed Betty Geary’s home and farm and ripped the manufactured home her son and daughter-in-law, Tom and Sharon Geary, were living in off of its foundation.

The Gearys were lucky. Linda K. Hasty, 59, and Daniel, Barbara, Jeff and Terrance “Joe” Monroe all died when the tornado hit their Seneca-area mobile homes.