TORNADO ALLEY

Close-up footage of tornadoes has become common in the cellphone-camera age, but the episode does an especially effective job of combining images from several sources into a timeline that conveys just how frightening it was when a huge tornado destroyed a large part of that town, killing 25 people.

Witnesses, including those who shot the footage, recount the personal dramas within the larger catastrophe. A meteorologist on the air related news of the tornado even as it bore down on his neighborhood. A man shielded schoolchildren with his body as a roof collapsed on them. The numbing aftermath included, for one witness, the realization that, in farm country, people were not the only casualties.