While heavy rain and 150 mph winds battered his grandmother’s mobile home in Springfield, Missouri, Matt Suter (pictured below) 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 March 12, 2006, the trailer the 19-year-old was living in with his grandmother and uncle was engulfed by a tornado. Matt was sucked up and propelled 1,307 feet, but miraculously didn’t 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, meaning it was a “significant” tornado with enough power to rip roofs off houses, lift cars off the ground, and demolish mobile homes. The trailer 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 thrown the same distance as four football fields laid end to end. He landed in a field of soft grass, and besides the minor injury caused by the lamp, he was unscathed. He climbed a barbed wire fence to escape the field, running down a gravel road until he reached a neighbor’s house. The neighbor, Don Cornelison, called Matt’s brother, who picked him up and drove him back to the trailer site. The only thing that remained intact was the deck. Matt’s grandmother and uncle had been buried under the debris of the mobile home, but both survived. Matt said 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.
