Rita Bennett remembers the day a twister ripped through Topeka, Kansas, like it was yesterday. Bennett, her mother, father and grandmother were returning from a grocery run in north Topeka, when the sirens went off. She and her family went to her aunt’s home and sheltered under tables in the basement corner.
Bennett, who was about to turn 10 years old at the time, got separated from her parents in the basement. She remembers desperately grasping for her father’s hand, but he was just out of reach. The sound of the tornado, she said, was deafening and unforgettable.
“It was just the most awful sound I think I’ve ever heard — things hitting the table, the thunder, the sound,” Bennett said. “I swear the train was going through the house, and it seemed like forever, and then it just stopped.”
The 1966 Topeka tornado killed 17 people, injured more than 500 people and caused $2.3 billion in damage, adjusted for 2023 inflation, making it one of the nation’s costliest tornadoes. The twister tested the longstanding urban legend, based on an oral story passed down by Potawatomi tribe spiritual leaders, that Burnett’s Mound could deflect tornadoes and spare Topeka from incoming storms.
Bennett, and others, say the addition of a water tower and construction around the mound six years earlier opened the door for the devastating twister.
“You protect the mound, and it will protect you,” she said. “They shouldn’t have touched Burnett’s Mound. It was karma.”
Another Kansas weather legend is better known around Kansas City. The Tonganoxie Split holds that the physical — or even “mythical” — aspects of Tonganoxie, Kansas, 28 miles west of Kansas City, cause tornadoes and storms to split and weaken, sparing the metro area from inclement weather.
The last tornado to hit Tonganoxie, in May 2000, caused $2.6 million in damage and no recorded deaths or injuries.
Most Tonganoxie locals believe at least somewhat in the phenomenon, but the scientists KCUR spoke to were split on its plausibility. KSHB’s Wes Peery couldn’t find a definitive conclusion when he investigated the Split, either.
The Tonganoxie Split likely originated after people misunderstood a decree from Chief Tonganoxie of the Delaware tribe, as Jim Moore, author of a fictional book centered around the Split, told the Lawrence Journal-World in 2014. When Chief Tonganoxie’s decree stated there would be “no more storms,” he spoke about an end to violence, not about the weather, Moore said in the 2014 interview. WDAF weatherman Dan Henry also referenced the Split several times in his broadcasts, a 1984 Kansas City Times article reported.
Jonathan Kurtz, a warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Pleasant Hill, Kansas, location, said the Split is “ingrained in the weather lexicon of Kansas City” but lacks scientific backing.
Most places in America have legends similar to the Split, he said. “Everywhere I’ve worked, there has been something like this,” Kurtz said.
He said urban legends like the Split spread because of “general confirmation bias.”
“It’s inherent that human beings always want to know why. Why does something happen?” Kurtz said. “We’re always looking for an answer, and we see something like that, it’s talked about, and it just kind of grows with time.”
In Tonganoxie, it’s considered common knowledge.
“Oh, I know it’s real,” said Bob Hurst, a Tonganoxie resident in his mid-70s. “You can see thunderstorms coming, we’re going to get hit with them, and, all of a sudden, they just kind of go to the north, to the south of us.”
John Lavin, a Rimkus Consulting Group forensic meteorologist, said otherwise. The Split may exist under certain conditions, but needs more scientific documentation, Lavin said.
It’s less about whether the Split exists, and more about if certain climatological factors cause storms to split or change before they reach urban areas.
Thunderstorms need three “ingredients” to form: moisture, unstable air and lift. Thunderstorms form when air warmed by the sun’s heat begins to rise, called an updraft, and carries evaporated water upward to form a cloud. The cloud grows if the warm surface air is lighter and warmer than the air around it.
Clouds then darken as they fill with water, and cool, dry air from the Earth’s upper atmospheric layer — called a downdraft — pulls the moisture down and causes it to rain. The Kansas City area is prone to thunderstorms because of the warm, moist environments in the spring and summer and strong, western winds in the spring.
Dev Niyogi, an Earth and planetary sciences professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has conducted research that found cities change the structure of thunderstorms. Niyogi’s 2011 study found that thunderstorms changed structure over the Indianapolis metro region, and his 2014 study found that tornadoes touched down around 10 miles from urban areas in Indiana.
Niyogi said the size and shape of a city could split storms. The topography, such as hills or mountains, and a city’s relative warmth compared to surrounding natural areas could cause thunderstorms to break apart as well. “It could just be the storm characteristics itself,” Niyogi said. “Is it rolling in, or is it a fast-moving storm?”
KCUR asked scientists if the factors Niyogi listed could influence storm splitting. They either offered a different opinion or said there wasn’t enough research to back anything up.
“There’s been a lot of research done, and honestly, if you look at a lot of the papers … the conclusions are all over the place,” Kurtz said.
San Jose State University Professor Emeritus Robert Bornstein said urban heat islands — which form when buildings, roads and other manmade structures absorb and re-emit the sun’s heat more than surrounding natural landscapes — can push heat up into a storm, disrupting its fragile physical and chemical components.
Building barriers also significantly impact storms, Niyogi says, like when a car avoids a barrier. “It is not going to hit that barrier and take a left turn,” he said. “It is slowly going to swerve itself away from that barrier, the same way the winds do that.”
Bornstein studied thunderstorm behavior over large urban areas in Beijing, New York City, Atlanta and Houston. He found that under certain conditions, thunderstorms split or converged over these cities. The seasons, temperature and wind temperament determined how thunderstorms interacted with urban areas.
Kurtz pointed out several tornadoes that have hit large cities recently – including just across the state in St. Louis this spring, and in two larger Texas cities, Fort Worth and Lubbock, in previous decades.
Despite new radar and data and technology “growing leaps and bounds,” scientists still don’t know a lot about how storms impact the immediate environment, Kurtz said.
Hills and mountains, like buildings, can disrupt and redirect wind flow with their height, according Niyogi. Mountains can destabilize thunderstorms in eastern America but initiate storms in the west, Lavin said. That’s why Denver is so prone to hailstorms, he added.
Here’s where the Split comes in.
Borstein believes the Kansas City metro area, not Tonganoxie, causes storms to split. Tonganoxie doesn’t have enough tall buildings or a large enough urban heat island to disrupt storms, he said, but Kansas City does.
Niyogi said Kansas City and Tonganoxie work in tandem to split storms. “It is probably the two of them together that are doing this,” he said. “So, let’s give Tonganoxie some credit.”
Wanyun Shao, an environmental social scientist and associate professor of geography at the University of Alabama, said that people believe in weather phenomena like the Split because of something called “motivated reasoning.”
Shao, who authored a 2015 journal on how local weather events influence public perceptions of climate change, said that while confirmation bias partially explains the psychological reasoning behind why people believe in weather myths, motivated reasoning would be a more accurate term.
“People feel more motivated to believe in this myth if their house was spared from the last hits by this tornado,” she said. “They’re motivated to believe, ‘Oh, I was spared this time. I will be spared forever because there is some kind of mysterious power.’”
Still, not all residents are convinced there’s an earthly explanation. Gabrielle Borjon, who’s lived in Tonganoxie for 14 years, believes in the Split because “real bad storms just skip over us without fail.” Tornadoes in Tonganoxie are unheard of, she said.
“If there’s a severe storm on either side of us, it almost always goes around. We’ll get thunderstorms and rain and stuff, but nothing too severe,” Borjon said. “I feel like that's not a coincidence.”
Regardless of what the science says, people just want to make sense of the world and feel safe.
“It can happen to anybody,” Shao said. “They just want to feel they’re the lucky ones that will avoid this kind of catastrophe.”
