The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (14 page)

 • • • 

Heading north on Interstate 44 in Newcastle, just south of the Oklahoma City line, Chance Coldiron, a storm chaser for KOCO, was closer than anyone to the tornado. He was driving almost right beside it, about half a mile away, as it began to tear through the farmland on its way toward Moore. Before his eyes it went from being a towering vortex, rising more than a thousand feet in the air, to a monstrous black cloud of death that seemed to swallow the entire western sky. As Coldiron and his chasing partner, Justin Cox, slowed to allow the twister to cross the highway directly in front of them, they stared in near silence at a storm that was more violent than anything they had ever seen before. It was like Armageddon come alive, a vast, churning maul of death shrouded in swirling debris. As they watched, the tornado blew apart an old section of the Interstate 44 bridge, crossing the North Canadian River, which divided Newcastle and Oklahoma City. Giant uprooted trees were being tossed around like tiny splinters, and they could see roofs from destroyed houses and random scraps of metal that looked no larger than Skittles as they hovered in the air around the tornado. Suddenly Coldiron cried out in shock. “Oh, those are cars! Oh my gosh, those are cars!” he screamed.

At KFOR, Morgan was growing more panicked by the second as he watched the tornado crossing into what was now officially Oklahoma City. The funnel was so shrouded in debris he could barely see it, and it hadn’t even hit a heavily populated area yet. Morgan could not imagine how anyone watching the coverage could fail to get how bad the storm was, but he knew from past tornadoes that there were always people who didn’t take shelter or waited until it was simply too late. The thought terrified him, but it also made him angry that people could be so careless with their lives. Morgan knew all too well what people said about him, that he was sometimes too dramatic on air, that he scared his viewers unnecessarily. But at this moment, as he looked at the increasingly ferocious storm, he didn’t care. And so, with the air of a frustrated fire-and-brimstone preacher trying to save souls from the very brink of hell, he began to plead with his viewers, begging them to realize how serious the storm was, that another unmerciful tornado was coming for Moore and no one was safe. They needed to do whatever it would take to save their lives and those of people they cared about.

While England and Lane had been urging people to get below ground, Morgan cast the situation in even starker terms. It wouldn’t be enough, he said, to go to an interior closet or bathroom—long the method of choice for many Oklahomans. Most homes weren’t built with basements; the ground was damp and sandy, and basement rooms often leaked, making their upkeep too costly. And even though Moore had been hit several times before, many people didn’t have exterior storm shelters or safe rooms, and if they did, some were too scared to use them—worried that debris could trap them inside. Now Morgan pleaded with his viewers to use their underground shelters, telling them it was the only way they could be sure to survive what was coming at them. “If you can’t get below ground, get out of its way,” Morgan declared, with mounting alarm in his voice. “You never want to say it, but we’re going to say it right now: This is May 3 all over again as far as the intensity of this tornado, where it is heading. Something has to change fast, or it’s going to be very close to a May 3 event.”

 • • • 

Less than ten minutes had passed since the tornado hit the ground. As it began to churn its way through a mostly rural neighborhood south of 149th Street in Oklahoma City, it swelled in size to nearly a mile wide, though it looked much larger. The debris around it was so thick it reminded some of the storms that hit during the Dust Bowl, the horrifying “black blizzards” that crawled along the landscape devouring everything in their path.

Six miles across town, Steve Eddy, Moore’s city manager, was on the first floor of City Hall in the emergency command center watching the nightmare unfold on television. Outside the sirens were wailing—a sound that never failed to send chills down his spine, no matter how often he’d heard them growing up. Eddy was known to be unflappable, but as he heard Morgan liken the storm to May 3, his heart sank. Perhaps more than anybody Eddy knew the horror of what that meant. He had been on the front lines of that disaster and remembered vividly how overwhelming, how exceedingly awful it had been. Standing there watching another tornado approach, his mind was busy thinking of everything that would need to be done the second the storm lifted—deploying the police and emergency workers to the hard-hit neighborhoods, making official requests for state and federal support, implementing a disaster plan that was now hauntingly familiar because they’d been through this deadly scenario so many times before.

Eddy knew he didn’t have time to dwell on questions he didn’t have the answers to, that he needed to remain focused for the people of his city, who had already been through so much. But for a moment he couldn’t help himself. Why was this happening to Moore again? What was it that made his city so vulnerable, so unlucky? On television he caught an up-close glimpse of that massive black cloud grinding its way toward the western part of his city, beamed out by one of the storm trackers frantically driving away from it. The storm was now less than 3 miles from the Moore city line and showed no signs of lifting.
Oh shit,
Eddy thought to himself.

A
nthony Connel left work early to beat the storm, but as he found himself stuck in heavy traffic heading south on Interstate 44, he wondered if he’d made the right decision. At fifty-one Connel was a lifelong Oklahoman. He had long since grown used to the volatile springtime weather, though he’d had more close encounters than he would have liked. Over the years, he and his wife, Virginia, a math teacher at Southmoore High School in Moore, had watched as threatening storms had passed by—including one or two that produced funnel clouds—but it wasn’t something he worried much about. The May 3 storm barely missed his home on May Avenue just south of 149th Street, but in the end they had always been spared.

Suddenly, a little under 2 miles from his home, with the May Avenue exit finally in sight, traffic ground to a dead stop. Frustrated and stuck, Connel sat in his truck and listened as the radio broadcast frantic reports about the tornado that had hit the ground near Newcastle, just southwest of his house. He began to wonder if his luck had finally run out. Looking across the wide-open land to the east, he could make out his neighborhood in the distance—a somewhat rural community where you had close neighbors but also enough acreage to raise horses or other livestock. He and his wife had two miniature donkeys named Gizmo and Lil Bit, furry companions they loved as much as one could love a pet. The donkeys lived in his backyard, right behind the garage where he’d spent years painstakingly restoring a cherry red 1970 Plymouth Road Runner, a car for which they didn’t even make parts anymore. Except for the occasional weekend spin or car show, it sat in his garage with a giant stuffed Wile E. Coyote (from Looney Tunes) in the backseat, a nod to the car’s name. He’d parked the car there to keep it safe from the elements, but now it was at risk, along with everything else he and his wife owned.

Right behind his house was a storm shelter, which he left unlocked during most of the spring in case of days like this. His wife was still at work—he’d called her to tell her he was heading home—but he knew some of his neighbors, who didn’t have underground safe spots of their own, were probably already crouched inside. He hoped they would be safe.

Suddenly he saw it in the distance: an angry, swirling monster cloud that was so huge and wide it didn’t even look like a regular tornado. It seemed to take up the entire sky as it passed over the highway about a mile ahead of him. It was moving in a slow diagonal to the northeast, and unless it suddenly changed direction, his house was in its bull’s-eye. All Connel could do was watch. He felt sick to his stomach as he watched the massive black cloud devour everything in its path—trees, cars, and towering electrical transformers that looked like robots standing high above the prairie. They had once seemed strong enough to withstand anything, but now they flashed in anger as they were bent and ripped apart by the tornado’s hellish winds. Connel had never felt so helpless in his life as he did now. He watched the black monster drawing closer and closer to his neighborhood until suddenly he couldn’t see his house anymore. It was engulfed by the tornado.

 • • • 

Six miles to the east, along SE Fourth Street in Moore, Robert Romines, the soon-to-be superintendent of Moore Public Schools, had gathered with his colleagues at the administration building to watch the tornado on television. Outside the storm sirens were wailing, but nobody moved an inch. The worst-case scenario that had seemed so unimaginable hours earlier was actually happening: A tornado was on the ground, and more than a dozen of their thirty-two schools were close to or within its projected path. Of these, only two had storm shelters: Westmoore High School and Kelley Elementary, which had taken direct hits from the 1999 tornado and had been rebuilt with concrete safe rooms able to shelter hundreds of people.

Now, at dozens of schools across the district, the children who hadn’t been checked out by their parents were crouching and taking cover in interior hallways the way they had practiced so many times before. But nobody had ever dreamed they would actually have to take cover for real—not even Romines, who had practiced the same drills when he was kid growing up in Moore. It was simply unheard of for tornadoes to hit so early in the day. An untold number of the district’s 23,000 kids were now at risk and Romines, a teddy bear of a man who wore his heart on his sleeve, was almost physically sick with worry—not just as an educator but also as a parent. His youngest daughter, Avery, was at school at Wayland Bonds Elementary on May Avenue just north of 149th Street, right in the tornado’s path, and he knew the school had no shelter.

Suddenly Susie Pierce, Romines’s boss, who was just days away from retiring as superintendent, rushed down the hall, worry written all over her face. She had just gotten off the phone with Michelle McNear, the principal at Wayland Bonds, who had told her she could see the storm in the distance. McNear, a Moore native who had known Romines since they were kids, told Pierce to tell him that she was with his daughter. “Tell Romines it’s going to be okay,” McNear said.

But almost as soon as the words were out of her mouth, the power went out, and McNear could see the tornado, so terrifyingly close entire trees were swirling in the air around it. “It’s in our backyard,” she told Pierce, her words steady but fear in her voice. It looked like the school was going to take a direct hit. And then the connection went dead.

As Pierce relayed the phone call, fear shot through Romines’s heart and he suddenly knew he couldn’t just sit there anymore. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice choking, “but I have to go. I have to get over there.” He jumped to his feet and ran out of the room; on his heels was Jeff Horn, the school district’s operations manager, who told him he would come with him. As the two ran outside to one of the district’s official trucks, the sirens were blaring and the wind was picking up. Looking to the west, Romines could see the dark cloud in the distance.
Go away,
he thought,
please just go away.

 • • • 

Live on KOCO, Damon Lane was trying to remain calm as he looked at a terrifying image of the dark twister as it headed down 149th Street, a road he had driven so many times since he had moved to Oklahoma in 2009. The image he was looking at came from two of the station’s best storm chasers—Danielle Dozier and Chris Lee, a photojournalist who had pursued hundreds of storms over the years for KOCO. Dozier, a meteorologist who had worked with Lane since they were both on air in Abilene, Texas, was, like Lee, a calm presence in the field, but as they sat just east of the storm, Lane could hear the anxiety in their voices. As Dozier and Lee took turns describing what they were seeing and where the storm seemed to be headed, viewers at home could hear the deafening roar of the tornado, which was now so large their live video simply looked like a black screen.

Lane thought of his wife, Melissa, who should have been home by now. He had texted her a few minutes earlier, warning her to take shelter immediately, and she hadn’t yet written back. It made him nervous, but he willed himself to remain focused. He had a job to do. On camera Lane began to tick off all the streets in the path of the storm and to call out by name the stores and shops and restaurants along the way, to give viewers a more specific sense of where the storm was going. It was what every television meteorologist in Tornado Alley had learned to do over the years, calling out neighborhood landmarks to drill into people how close the storm really was to them. It was more effective than simply relying on the map. But it only made Lane think of Melissa more. She didn’t pay much attention to street names either. When she’d moved to Moore from Dallas the previous fall after they’d gotten married, he’d tried to tell her which streets to take to get from their house to Target, but in the end he’d just had to name the stores along the way: Make a left at the 7-Eleven; turn right after the Sonic; and it was just past the Starbucks on the left.

Now Lane listed all the businesses he could think of along and near 149th Street, which turned into Nineteenth Street as it crossed from Oklahoma City into Moore, just as he had with his wife. Dick’s Sporting Goods, Walmart, the Warren Theatres, Home Depot, the Moore Athletic Club, “A Buffalo Wild Wings on the westhand side there,” he said. He could picture that area so vividly in his head. These weren’t just names on the map: They were the stores where he shopped, the places he went. “We are not trying to scare you,” Lane told his viewers, an edge in his voice, “but this is a very large tornado, and we want you to understand the tone we are using right now as a very serious situation, a life-threatening situation. . . . You need to take our warnings very seriously.” As he said this, trying to remain composed, Lane kept thinking of his wife. Where was she? Would she beat the storm?

 • • • 

The tornado traveled almost due east along 149th Street and had no mercy for any structure standing in its path. Many of the homes and farms along the road were literally wiped off their foundations in seconds as it passed. Behind one of the houses, Dan Garland was crammed into a tiny shelter with his wife and eight other neighbors, holding the door shut against the most intense winds he had ever experienced in his life. Suddenly, as he later recounted to the Associated Press, he began to feel the latch twist in his hand. The storm was trying to get in. He and another man quickly braced themselves and grabbed the door together, using their combined weight to hold it shut, praying it would be enough to save their lives. Across the road, fields of tall trees that had withstood the strong winds that regularly swept through the plains were torn and splintered in an instant.

 • • • 

On Gary England’s Doppler radar the eye of the twister had gone from crimson to almost black as the tornado’s winds began to exceed 200 miles per hour. The debris was so intense it began to show up on the radar, as it was hurled thousands of feet into the air and began to rotate in the upper levels of the storm. The ring of debris—the “debris ball,” as meteorologists refer to it—was more than a mile wide and growing. And those not directly in the path of the storm weren’t safe either. For at least a mile around it on all sides, straight-line winds exceeding 80 miles per hour were toppling trees and power lines, doing major damage to cars and homes, and nearly blowing off the road people trying to chase the storm.

About a quarter mile to the storm’s south, Val Castor and his wife, Amy, two veteran storm chasers for KWTV, kept having to flee their positions as electrical lines were snapped by the tornado’s winds. Castor, who had tracked the 1999 tornado and hundreds of others for Channel 9, was stunned at the storm’s ferocity. He was known for being a steady hand in the face of terrible weather, but as he phoned in to the station with a report from Pennsylvania Avenue just south of the storm, the alarm in his voice was palpable. What was in front of him was total mayhem, worse than what he had seen the day before. “I see boards. I see roofs of houses. I see tin. Everything is flying through the air. . . . There is just a ton of debris,” Castor told England, his voice panicked.

Suddenly Castor went somber and quiet. In the passenger seat Amy zoomed their camera in on the twister as it crossed the road directly in front of them. In the shot everything—trees, signs, homes—disintegrated in mere seconds in the cyclonic winds. “Gary, there’s houses in the air here,” Castor said, his voice deadly quiet.

At KWTV England let out a huge sigh on air. “I know,” he said, the heartache evident in his voice.