While heavy rain and 150-mph winds battered his grandmother’s mobile home, 19-year-old Matt Suter – wearing only his boxer shorts – was standing on top of the living room sofa, struggling to close a window.
He had no idea he was about to set a world record.
On 12 March 2006, the trailer Matt was living in with his grandmother and uncle in Missouri, USA, was engulfed by a tornado.
Matt was sucked up and propelled 398 metres (1,307 ft) but miraculously did not die. As a result, he set a record for the farthest distance survived in a tornado.
The twister was graded F2 on the Fujita scale for rating tornado intensity, meaning it was a ‘significant’ tornado with enough power to rip roofs off houses, lift cars off the ground, and destroy mobile homes.
“It got louder and louder, like 10 military jets coming at us,” Matt told Springfield News-Leader one week after the event.
The trailer’s exterior doors were blown off their hinges, and Matt recalled the floor “moving like Jell-O”.
While battling for balance, his head was suddenly struck by a heavy lamp, knocking him unconscious.
As the trailer walls collapsed, Matt was picked up by the tornado and flew 398 metres – roughly the same distance as four football pitches laid end to end.
He landed in a field of soft grass, and besides the head injury caused by the lamp, he was uninjured.
Bleeding and disoriented, Matt climbed a barbed wire fence to escape the field, then he ran down a gravel road and banged on a neighbour’s door.
The neighbour, Don Cornelison, called Matt’s brother, who picked him up and drove him back to the trailer site, where the only thing that remained intact was the deck.
Matt’s grandmother and uncle had been buried under the debris of their destroyed home but they both survived and managed to free themselves before Matt arrived.
The distance Matt flew was measured by a National Weather Service official using a GPS device.
One of the USA’s top tornado researchers, Tom Grazulis, said he didn’t know of anyone who’d been carried that far by a tornado and lived to tell the tale. According to him, Matt eclipsed the previous record set in 1955 by a nine-year-old girl and her pony who were virtually unharmed after being carried 1,000 feet by a tornado.
Due to being unconscious, Matt had no memory of his flight through the air, but his physician said his injuries – or lack thereof – supported the notion that he’d been lifted into the sky rather than blown across the ground, which would have resulted in more body surface abrasions and contusions.
Following this harrowing ordeal, Matt said he was grateful to be alive and he started going to church.
He planned to help his grandmother rebuild her home, complete with an underground storm cellar so that none of his family would be unlucky enough to break his record in the future.
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