At 5:00 p.m. on June 3, 1980, Danny and his best friend Arthur Darlington – a California native with six sisters – take a bike trip to the Mormon Island State Recreation Area to go on their first swim of the summer.
The boys take a bike ride through their neighborhood, run into their elderly neighbor, Belle Smiley, whose hair Linda is supposed to style before a church bazaar that Friday – and visit the Darlington's house.
As the twister starts to obliterate the Hatches' home, they ride out the storm in the shower of the basement's bathroom; they remain there after the tornado passes, as rain and hail hit them from above the hole where the house's first floor once stood, and as water from one of the severed underground pipes seeps in underneath them.
The three go to rescue Belle from the basement, using her kitchen table to navigate to her amid the partially collapsed back stairs, after Dan and Arthur find her asleep on a sofa, which they use as a makeshift ladder to get her and themselves out the window with Stacey helping from outside.
The next morning, Danny, Arthur and Stacey discuss walking to the Kmart and an armory, when the jail matron, Mrs. Minetti, asks the policewoman on duty to take the kids there on her way to her house in Doniphan.
As Dan runs to his destroyed house to see if either of his parents went there, John – with Linda and Ryan in the passenger's seat – drives up behind in his pickup truck as Danny crosses Fonner Park, where the family is reunited.
The tornado that hit Phillips had missed the farm (although the crops in the farmland were flooded by the rain accompanying the storm), and John spent much of the overnight searching around Grand Island for the rest of the family after returning to town and the remnants of their home on Sand Crane Drive around 1:15 a.m., eventually finding Linda and Ryan at a Presbyterian church – where they and Mrs. Smiley were sleeping on a rug in the minister's study – three hours and 15 minutes later but unable to find Danny when at the police station.
Goldie – who, after being rescued from the destroyed Meves Bowl, was taken to Omaha by a truck driver, where she stays in a hotel, before reuniting with the Hatches on the farm the following Friday by transport from a Red Cross volunteer – opts to move into an apartment closer to the center of Grand Island.
The home on Bismark Road in Grand Island that was inhabited by Rozendal, her husband, Harley, and their three children – sons Mark and Ryan, and daughter Cindy – was destroyed by an F4 tornado that caused severe damage throughout the southern portion of the city during the early evening of June 3.
Ruckman learned of the tornado's impact on Grand Island during a radio news report that ran hours after the storm, and subsequently made multiple failed attempts to contact her cousin by phone, eventually discovering that Florence and her family had survived several days later, when – while visiting her cousin's mother in Hastings – a police officer notified them that she had made it through the storm; Ruckman talked to Rozendahl ten days after the tornado struck.
Ruckman stated in a 1990 interview with the Grand Island Independent that writing Night of the Twisters gave her more of a respect at the power of severe weather, acknowledging, "I'm a lot more afraid of tornadoes than I used to be.