THEY ARE THE FASTEST-known winds on the face of the Earth, capable of obliterating a town within minutes in a whirling, frenzied attack. These are tornados, and their epicentre is Tornado Alley in the Prairies of the US. On April 3, 1974, the region was struck by a swarm of 148 tornados in only 17 hours, the greatest tornado outbreak in the world, and included some of the most powerful tornados known.

Documentaries and Hollywood films have turned tornados into something of a freak-show business, but 30 years ago there was so little known about them that warnings were rudimentary and the death tolls were appalling.

The atmosphere that day in April, 1974, was loaded like a bomb. Warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico hit cold air from the Rockies and exploded into intense thunderstorms. With high-altitude winds lending added spin, swarms of tornados descended from the clouds and sliced through 13 states. With little or no time for evacuations, the carnage was immense.

The town of Xenia, Ohio, population 25,000, was almost wiped off the map in only eight minutes by a monstrous tornado. One eyewitness actually recorded the sound of the screaming vortex before his house crashed down and buried him. Winds estimated at 300mph shredded buildings and shot the debris through the air like bullets. The phenomenal vacuum of the tornado’s funnel sucked people out of their homes. Half of the town was wrecked, some 1,500 buildings badly damaged or completely destroyed, 34 people were killed and 1,150 injured. Afterwards survivors scrambled out of the debris and faced a lunar landscape where their neighbourhoods used to be.

Across the region there were scenes straight out of the film Twister. Giant, 120ft-high television masts were snapped off and skipped around like tumbleweed, trucks flew through the air, and bits of houses swirled around tornado funnels like flocks of birds. And the arrival of the tornados was heralded by processions of raging storm clouds erupting with lightning, torrents of rain and giant hailstones.

The Midwest was in crisis as reports of the tornado strikes flooded in. Civil defence centres and police were overwhelmed, and hospitals could barely cope with the dead and wounded as blood supplies ran out and power supplies failed. In total, 335 people were killed and about 6,000 injured. It was reckoned to be a one-in-500-year disaster.

Journalist Mark Levine interviewed dozens of witnesses to reveal ordinary lives shattered by sudden disaster, reminiscent of survivors from bombing raids in the last war. However, weaving through so many different accounts makes for a rather dizzying read, and the wealth of detail becomes exhausting.

Although Levine does a brave job trying to explain the weather phenomena, some simple diagrams would have helped. But he does draw an interesting perspective of the political climate at that time, as the storm clouds gathered over Watergate and the postmortem from the Vietnam War poisoned the atmosphere. Not for nothing did President Nixon fly to Xenia afterwards to milk it for all the sympathy he could muster.

American Tornado: The Terrifying True Story of the 1974 Outbreak- And The People Whose Lives Were Torn Apart by Mark Levine

Ebury Press, £12.99;

Buy the book here at the offer price of £11.69 (free p&p)

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy