The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (12 page)

It wasn’t long before other stations began to try to hire him away. Gardner finally left—defecting to KWTV in 2011. KFOR replaced him with Jon Welsh, an Army National Reserve pilot who had just come back to Oklahoma after flying combat missions in Iraq, finally elevating the weather wars to an actual military level.

But the biggest shake-up was at KOCO. After eighteen years on the air, Rick Mitchell decided to leave Oklahoma City. In July 2012 he was offered a morning weather gig at NBC’s affiliate in Dallas with the promise that he would eventually become the station’s chief meteorologist. Even though it was a bigger market, Mitchell struggled with the decision. Oklahoma was the big leagues when it came to weather, but in some ways he had hit a wall. Like his competitors, he had dedicated much of his life to trying to protect Oklahomans from the storms, but in doing so he’d made sacrifices of his own. He’d been forced to skip his son’s basketball games and his daughter’s school events because of his long hours tracking storms. His daughter Zoe, who was just days old when he arrived in Oklahoma City, had just graduated from high school that spring. “I wish you’d been around more,” she’d told him as she prepared to head off to college. “You missed a lot of things.” It broke Mitchell’s heart. He vowed to spend more time with his family. Though Dallas was a bigger city, the job would not be as intense. Dallas stations didn’t interrupt programming for hours on end for thunderstorms—though Mitchell knew all it would take was one big tornado to change that. He hoped it wouldn’t come.

KOCO promoted one of his deputies, Damon Lane, to succeed him. A native of northern Virginia, just south of Washington, D.C., Lane, who was then thirty-one, had been at the station since 2009, working the morning weather shift and acting as a backup on blockbuster storm days. KOCO was only his second job in television. Before that he’d been in Abilene, Texas, where he’d been named the city’s favorite television meteorologist for three years in a row. They’d had storms in Texas, but nothing like the ones that hit Oklahoma City. Lane was young, good-looking, and ambitious, but he hadn’t always wanted to be on television. He’d grown up fascinated with the weather—an interest his mother, who was a science teacher, encouraged. At first, he thought he’d be an aviation meteorologist—a little like what Gary England had been early in his career—but an internship at a CBS affiliate in Norfolk, Virginia, during his first year of college changed that. Lane was bitten by the television bug, though he still took classes in aviation meteorology just in case landing a job in front of the camera didn’t work out.

At KOCO, Lane had been watching and learning from Mitchell, who had become his mentor those last three years, and he’d been watching the other stations too, observing how Gary England and Mike Morgan did their jobs. He pitched himself as someone who could chart that middle ground as Mitchell had—a calm and steady presence who could avoid the drama and could also appeal to new audiences. He had started taking Spanish lessons so that he could give bilingual weather warnings, a not-insignificant attribute in a market that was becoming ever more heavily Hispanic.

At first KOCO had thought of hiring a veteran and had looked to the other stations in town to see if it could lure away someone who had more experience with the high-octane atmosphere of severe weather days. But in the end it saw Lane as someone who could be a future star. Maybe he would attract a younger demographic. Was he ready? He thought he was.

 • • • 

An open question heading into the 2013 storm season was how much longer England would stay on air. KWTV had given him what it called a lifetime contract—though it technically ran through 2016. He was now seventy-three, and while he was still a legend, it was obvious that he no longer felt the same thrill on the job as he once had. It wasn’t that the storms excited him less. He still never felt more alive than when he was in the studio trying to protect people from that looming storm. But he didn’t like the direction he felt storm coverage was going, how sensationalistic it had become. He felt the storm chasers took too many risks, and on air he often couldn’t control himself, lecturing his team to pull back. “You’re too close,” he would say, sometimes with a hint of exasperation.

In late 2012 KWTV had hired a man it billed as England’s eventual successor: David Payne, Morgan’s right-hand man at KFOR, who had made his name as a daredevil storm chaser willing to take more risks than anyone when driving into a storm. If Morgan was dramatic, Payne was even more so, and while he’d signed off on the hire, England didn’t much like having one of his rival’s protégés in the wings, and he worried about what this decision meant for coverage going forward.

Payne’s defection was a major blow to Morgan, but he wasted no time in replacing him, hiring Reed Timmer, a thirty-three-year-old former reality-TV star as the station’s marquee storm chaser. The trouble was Timmer barely advertised his connection to KFOR and seemed to spend more time doing his own thing, shooting videos for his Web site and ferrying around other meteorologists, including talent from The Weather Channel. Nonetheless, hiring Timmer gave KFOR access to what was undoubtedly the most famous storm-chasing vehicle in the country: the Dominator, a ten-thousand-pound SUV that Timmer and his storm-chasing team had transformed into a tank. Designed with bulletproof glass and Kevlar and outfitted with the best cameras, the vehicle was built to be driven into tornadoes. Timmer had done so several times for the show
Storm Chasers,
which had aired on the Discovery Channel.

Timmer was an unabashed thrill seeker who often screamed and cursed while driving into the storms. But he also considered himself a scientist. A native of Michigan, he was getting his doctorate in meteorology at OU—a fact Morgan often mentioned on air. The Dominator, which was quickly rebranded as the 4Warn Dominator under Timmer’s contract with KFOR, had cannons that could shoot probes into tornadoes to measure winds and other conditions. It was a lot like the fictional “Dorothy” in
Twister.
Nobody really knew what came out of Timmer’s research. They only saw his videos of close calls with the storms. Timmer was so popular with the public that few at the station dared to complain publicly, but privately some assailed him as everything that was wrong with weather coverage. There were now thousands of people like him clogging the roads every spring, amateur storm chasers who ignored the risks to get ever closer to the storms.

No one was more unnerved by it all than Gary England—which was perhaps ironic, since he in many ways had started it all. He had been the original renegade, the man who rebelled against the National Weather Service and went to extremes to cover storms in ways that people had never even imagined. But now he worried that the public had come to think of the weather merely as entertainment. He worried that the coverage had desensitized viewers to how truly destructive and deadly the storms could be.

As he pulled into the station that Monday and headed into the studio under an increasingly dark sky, England hoped people would be paying attention that afternoon and that they wouldn’t think of this one as a harmless joyride.

At KWTV and its rival stations, the storm chasers were already being dispatched into position. As England walked into his office just off the studio floor, he could hear the whir of Jim Gardner’s helicopter powering up from the landing pad out back, preparing to search for the storm. England had deployed his other ground troops, as he called them, hours earlier.

KWTV had seven teams of two chasers—one to drive, the other to operate the camera and satellite equipment. Though they were on the payroll, most of the chasers had day jobs that had nothing to do with the weather, which they put on hold during the spring. They had somehow parlayed their obsession with spotting tornadoes into a paying gig. There was a mechanic, a computer technician, and a retired Oklahoma City cop. Two were husband and wife teams—Val and Amy Castor and Hank and Patty Brown—who had been chasing storms for KWTV for so long they were household names. In both instances, it was the men who got most of the airtime, as they narrated the storms they chased, but England always credited their wives as the brains behind the operation—the ones who mastered all the technology needed to keep their mobile studio up and running while keeping their daredevil husbands somewhat in check.

It was always a gamble where to preposition storm chasers. Though the forecast had suggested the worst storms would be to the south in the direction of Texas, England, acting on a hunch, had kept most of his “StormTrackers,” as they were branded on air, closer to Oklahoma City. At KFOR, Mike Morgan sent most of his teams—including Reed Timmer, who was ferrying around a crew from The Weather Channel in his Dominator—south. Helicopter pilot Jon Welsh was hovering around Oklahoma City, keeping an eye out for developments to the west.

At KOCO, Damon Lane and his team were operating at a disadvantage to their rivals. That morning, Lane had waked up to an e-mail from the Federal Aviation Administration saying it was grounding Sky 5, the station’s helicopter, for its annual inspection and certification. KOCO had a smaller chase team than the other stations—three teams of two people—and the chopper, their most important tool, was now out of commission for the day. Lane, who already felt like an underdog going up against England and Morgan, was frustrated. Couldn’t the FAA have waited until June or a day when the weather was not expected to be so stormy? But he was determined not to stew about things he couldn’t change. The FAA had forced his hand. While the forecast still suggested the most volatile storms would erupt to the south, Lane, like England, had a hunch it would be closer to Oklahoma City—maybe right over Moore, his newly adopted hometown, where he lived with his wife, Melissa. Stay close to Oklahoma City, Lane told his troops. It was a gamble, and he hoped it was right.

T
he rain began with a handful of big fat drops that cut through the thick, humid air so few and far between it wasn’t immediately clear if it was actually raining or just dripping from some invisible gutter that seemed to envelop the entire city of Moore.

As the clock neared 2:00
P.M.
at Plaza Towers Elementary on the west side of town, the temperature hovered around eighty degrees—though it felt about ten degrees warmer. The air was so turbid and muggy that standing outside for just a few seconds would make your skin clammy and damp with sweat. May was usually the wettest month of the year in Oklahoma, but even so, the atmosphere was unusually swampy—in sharp contrast to recent days, when the heat had been so dry it had felt like the entire state was caught in the outflow of a blazing-hot furnace.

A loud bang of thunder in the distance rattled Plaza’s old windows and then the heavens opened, unleashing a ferocious torrent of precipitation so heavy it was hard to see directly across the street. But just as quickly as the rain had come, it suddenly ceased, as if some unseen hand hovering in the clouds had turned off a spigot. It had been like this for most of the afternoon, as weather fronts began moving through town—some fiercer than others. The sky grew dark, then light again. There was lightning, then a peek of sun, followed by more rain in an unsettling cycle repeated again and again.

Sitting in her office near Plaza’s front entrance, her windows facing due north, Amy Simpson, the school’s principal, tried to think of it as just another day of thunderstorms. But in the back of her mind she felt a nagging sense of worry. The forecast hadn’t improved since she’d left the house that morning—in some ways it had grown more ominous. Alerts kept flashing on her cell phone, punctuated by tense e-mails from the head of Moore Public Schools urging staff citywide to stay alert. Dangerous storms with a strong likelihood of tornadoes, possibly hitting around school dismissal time, the forecast said. That was soon. Classes were scheduled to end at 4:00
P.M.
—a little over two hours away. “Keep calm, watch for valid information and pray,” one of the e-mails from the head office read. “It is May in Oklahoma. We can do this.”

The tone of the message worried Simpson. Was it really going to be that bad? Whatever was to happen, she knew the school was as ready as it could be. Like most schools in Oklahoma—and most homes, surprisingly—Plaza didn’t have a storm shelter. So students and teachers had been instructed to go to what were believed to be the safest spots in the building: the interior hallways. It was where kids for generations had been taught to go when the weather turned bad. Under her supervision Plaza’s five hundred students and fifty staff members had regularly participated in tornado drills, faithfully practicing their duck-and-cover positions in the school’s hallways. Only a few weeks earlier they’d had a drill, a refresher before storm season officially began. The sirens had wailed a few times, but Simpson had never known a tornado to actually hit during school hours—not when she was a kid going to class in Moore and not in her nearly twenty years as an educator in her hometown. As a rumble of thunder shook the building, Simpson hoped that this wouldn’t be a first. The idea of a tornado hitting so early in the day seemed so far-fetched that she was more worried about things she thought actually would happen: heavy rains, high winds, and bruising chunks of hail. There were plenty of latchkey kids at Plaza, and there was no way she could send them home in conditions like that, however close they lived. But her mind kept returning to the forecast. Possible tornadoes hitting around dismissal time. Could it really happen?

Simpson wasn’t the only one at Plaza Towers who was worried. Virtually everybody in the building had come to school that morning having listened to the ominous forecast, and while they tried to go on with their day, many simply couldn’t. They looked outside at the sky and worried. What was coming? Would it hit before school let out? Some of the teachers checked the weather radar on their iPads or pulled up the live streams of the local television stations on their iPhones—discreetly so as not to scare the kids. By then many of the Oklahoma City stations had gone to uninterrupted coverage. Outside in the halls the teachers told their colleagues in hushed voices what they were seeing. Just as predicted, a line of storms was developing toward the west; if they blew up, as the weather forecasters were anticipating, Moore would be right in the bull’s-eye of the storm.

Jennifer Doan, a third-grade teacher, had woken up with an almost oppressive feeling that something bad was going to happen. The day before, a tornado had touched the ground not far from her house in Edmond, and with the forecast predicting even more dangerous storms that Monday, she worried about driving home after school in the middle of heavy rain and whatever else the weather would bring. But there was something deeper, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, that was nagging at her. As she had prepared to leave the house that morning just after sunrise, she’d leaned over and kissed her fiancé, Nyle, who was still in bed. “I’m worried,” she had told him. “I don’t have a good feeling.” Still drowsy, he’d told her to call in sick. But she couldn’t. It was the last week of school, she’d said, she couldn’t just skip work.

Thirty miles away, Erin Baxter, a twenty-seven-year-old kindergarten teacher, was experiencing a similar feeling of dread as she sat in her kitchen in Norman and watched the forecast before heading in to work. She had grown up in south Oklahoma City and, like Simpson, had gone to school in Moore her entire life. She had been in junior high when the May 3, 1999, tornado had hit, and fourteen years later not one storm had passed that hadn’t made her think back to that day. The tornado had missed her house by a mile or so, but one of her friends had been seriously injured and she could still remember how scary the sky had been, that feeling that some uncontrollable monster was preying on her helpless city. While she loved a bout of really stormy weather, as most Oklahomans do, she had never forgotten how mean and unsparing a nasty storm could be. On television she heard a forecaster repeat the warning that some of the more dangerous storms could develop in the afternoon, possibly as early as 3:00
P.M
. Parents and schools should be alert, he said. As she switched the television off, Baxter closed her eyes and said a little prayer.
Please, God,
she thought.
If there are storms, please let them be a little later.

At school the teachers put on brave faces for the kids, but Simpson could see they were worried. As she walked the halls, she saw her staff joking and laughing with the students, who were beside themselves knowing summer vacation was only days away. But there was something in their eyes, something in the way they talked. Simpson knew them well enough to know they were on edge. While she was nervous too, she was determined to stay focused and positive. She knew that, as head of school, people looked to her to see how she was reacting and handling things, and she knew she had to keep it together, no matter what happened.

Simpson hadn’t had time to obsessively check the radar, which was probably a good thing. She was simply too busy, and she left it up to her office assistant, Penny, who was so vigilant in her task that her colleagues referred to her as Plaza’s “radar watcher.” If a bad storm was coming, Simpson knew Penny would come running.

For Simpson that Monday was one of the most hectic days of the year, but it was also a day she had been looking forward to for weeks. That morning she had overseen the year-end award ceremonies for the first- and second-grade classes and prepared for others later in the week. Nothing made her job more fulfilling than seeing her students happy and confident in what they had accomplished. She had fretted over every detail of the ceremonies, spending most of Sunday afternoon, her day off, helping the teachers set up the ceremonies and organize the individual awards to honor students who had excelled in subjects like math or spelling. The end-of-the-year awards were a big deal at any school, but Simpson considered them to be especially important at Plaza, a school that had gone through a few tough years.

 • • • 

Built in 1966, Plaza Towers was one of the oldest elementary schools in Moore, opened just four years after Moore officially became a city. Its flat, one-story building was located on SW Eleventh Street, a few blocks east of the city line between Oklahoma City and Moore, right in the center of what had used to be one of the city’s most thriving neighborhoods. But over the years, as Moore had expanded, people had moved to newer parts of town, and the neighborhood had gone from being one of the city’s more affluent to being one of its poorest. Still, Plaza had been regarded as one of the city’s top elementary schools, with a roster of active parents who valued education as much as the teachers did. The students had consistently scored high on state education tests, buoyed by parents who spent their evenings reading with the kids or helping them study.

But when a brand-new elementary school had opened a few miles away in 2010, many of Plaza’s most active families had transferred—and several of the teachers had followed. Plaza had gone from being one of the better schools in the district to being one that was considered to be struggling. Some of the parents worked multiple jobs trying to make ends meet, and many of the kids were left to fend for themselves. It had been up to the teachers to fill that absence, encouraging them to read and study in their spare time—even if no one at home was nagging them to do so. Though morale had been low among the staff, the teachers who had stayed behind had thought of themselves as survivors put there by God to help kids who truly needed them.

And slowly Plaza had started to build itself back up—largely thanks to Simpson, an assistant principal who had been promoted to the top job in 2010. She had simply refused to give up on her school or her students, even if the odds sometimes felt stacked against them.

 • • • 

Simpson had not always known she wanted to be an educator. Her father sold NAPA auto parts, and her mother was an administrative assistant at an oil-services company. When she graduated from Moore High School and went on to the University of Oklahoma, she hadn’t decided what she would do with her life. It wasn’t until her sophomore year of college that she realized she wanted to be a teacher, though the instinct had always been there. Back in middle school and into high school, Simpson, who was a good student, often found herself silently critiquing her instructors. She watched how they delivered their lesson plans and considered what she would have done differently. She especially cringed at teachers who were unkind and impatient with students who were struggling. Only years later did she realize that this was an early sign of her calling in education.

She never worked anywhere but in Moore. She did her student teaching in her hometown, and when she graduated from OU, she landed a permanent job with the school system, teaching third and sixth grades for almost ten years. She got a master’s degree after that and moved into administration, working as an assistant principal at three different elementary schools, including Plaza, over the next five years. Every year Simpson wondered if it was her turn to be promoted to head principal, and when she wasn’t, she wondered why she had been overlooked. Her reviews were good, and she had the experience. “You’re itching for the big chair,” one of the principals she worked for told her, “but you’ve gotta be careful: You might not want the big chair once you’ve got it.”

But Simpson wanted it, even if it wasn’t easy. Standing five foot three, with long blond hair and an easy smile, she was often compared to Grace Kelly by her colleagues at Plaza, who saw a bit of the reserved Hitchcock blonde in her demeanor. She was gentle and soft-spoken and kind, but inside there was a fiery grit, a toughness. She was a fighter, a rock when others would have been inclined to cave. She hadn’t fully known how tough she really was until she was promoted to the top job at Plaza. In some ways it was the last job anybody would have wanted: taking over a struggling school. But Simpson refused to give up on Plaza, even if she and her teachers often struggled to get parents to understand how important early education was to their kids and be invested in it. She believed in the importance of personal touch, in making sure people knew they were loved and important. And though she had five hundred students, Simpson knew almost every one of them by name—and their parents too, when she saw them. She saw the award ceremonies not only as a way of celebrating the kids and encouraging them but also as a chance to engage their parents and to show them why education was important.

In her mind the little things mattered. She was a firm believer in routine, and that morning she’d started off the school day as she always did—gathering her students in the cafeteria for their daily “Rise and Shine” assembly, where they said the Pledge of Allegiance and recited Plaza’s school creed:

I am a proud Plaza Tower Panther.

I am a capable and dependable student,

Full of possibilities and potential.

I choose to think before I act, using good judgment.

I accept the responsibilities for my actions.

I do not have the right to interfere with the learning or well-being of others.

My destiny is in my hands.

I am one in a million and proud of it.

I am a proud Plaza Tower Panther, yeah!

Simpson couldn’t help but smile as she listened to her kids in their tiny singsong voices passionately chanting their special creed. She knew most didn’t know what it all meant, what destiny and potential were, but she believed in the power of words and that speaking things made them happen. Her students
were
one in a million. They
were
full of potential. She knew all of their sweet faces and loved them nearly as much as she did her own kids. She knew her teachers felt much as she did. What they wouldn’t do for them! Glancing toward the windows, Simpson saw that it had started to rain.