One of seven tornados cut a swath through Omaha at 5:30pm on Easter Sunday, March 23, 1913. More than a hundred people perished with many more injured and the city’s infrastructure in ruin. A century later, scars of the event are still palpable in the story, architecture, and photographic memory of the city.
Devil Clouds is worth the watch. This hour-long documentary made around the 100th anniversary explores the event and its aftermath. I found it while researching the two stray postcards here. Digging through the Nebraska State Historical Society Archives, I got the tragic news more than a century late.
Disaster images fill in what words can’t describe. In the immediate response, their visual details and captions become coordinates for streets that no longer have familiar signs and recognizable landmarks. Soon, commercial postcards are for sale and news gets out to concerned family and friends. In Omaha, before-and-after pictures of restored homes and businesses appeared in less than a year. Even today, the moral story of the town is built on that rubble and their can-do recovery effort.
The vintage images help us contextualize world events then and now. Their lore of community resilience gives us clues about what to do when fortune fails us. We pool resources, stay connected, and get crafty. In Omaha, the ‘Hello Girls’ kept the few working telephone lines staffed right through the storm, then turned their building into a hospital in the days after.
Disaster postcards are a substantial niche in the much larger scene of collecting postcards that document historic events. As we discovered last year, the birth of a volcano in Mexico was global news in 1943. For a small village it was pure tragedy. For collectors, these images are rare finds.
Though the timing is coincidental, comparing nature’s wrath with man-made disaster is also telling. Omaha was in a moment of rebirth as the fog of WWI descended on Europe. The Parícutin volcano plumes briefly stole the newsreel spotlight from wartime food-rationing in March 1943.
Why do we cause each other such suffering, knowing what life already has in store? The evidence is brutal, shouldn’t it also be obvious? It is best to prepare for tornado season, and avoid war.