The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (16 page)

“It’s here,” she said, and in the distance she could hear the tornado’s roar.

L
ando Hite was inside one of the barns at Celestial Acres, a horse-training facility on the grounds of the 160-acre Orr Family Farm just off 149th Street and Western Avenue, when he noticed the horses were starting to act a little spooked. Outside the wind was picking up, but Hite, a twenty-four-year-old Oklahoma native, didn’t think much of it. There had been bad weather the day before and the day before that. It was a typical spring day in Oklahoma and he was used to the afternoon storms, even if the horses weren’t.

Tall and skinny with a gentle drawl, Hite was a self-described cowboy, or at least that’s what he said when people asked him what he did for a living. He slept on a bunk inside a tiny tack room at the farm, where he worked as a caretaker and exercise rider for more than a dozen Thoroughbred racehorses. As they often were at this time of year, the stables were almost full—packed with some sixty-five other Thoroughbreds and quarter horses in town to compete in the spring races at Remington Park, on the north side of Oklahoma City.

There were no meets that Monday, and Hite spent the day as he usually did, grooming and riding the horses around Celestial Acres’ training track. It sat alongside the agriculture theme park operated by the Orr family, which featured pony rides and a petting zoo full of chickens, pigs, rabbits, goats, and sheep. The farm was a popular place in May, often crawling with kids on their end-of-the-school-year field trips, but it was quiet on this Monday as a result of the ominous skies. Soon enough the heavens opened up, pounding the barns with heavy rain, large hail, and blistering winds as loud claps of thunder shook the ground like tiny earthquakes.

Hite stayed inside with the horses until he noticed that the storm had suddenly let up. Walking out into the yard to enjoy the reprieve, he immediately sensed that something was off. It was strangely quiet. There were no birds chirping, no sound of traffic, just an eerie stillness. That’s when he glanced toward the west and saw it in the distance: an angry black vortex on the ground no more than a mile away heading down 149th Street straight for him. He had never seen a tornado before, only on television or in the movies. He stood frozen for a second wondering what to do, until he was hit by a straight-on wind gust that almost blew him to the ground.

Hearing a horse neighing behind him, he booked it back to the stables and began freeing all the animals he could, running from building to building as he herded them from their stalls toward the open pasture behind the farm. He hoped that allowing the horses to run free might give them a better chance of surviving the monster tornado than they would have penned up in buildings that already seemed to be swaying in the terrible winds. By now the funnel was bearing down on the farm like a freight train, and it suddenly seemed he was living out a scene from
Twister.
Branches and pieces of boards began to fly past him like deadly stakes, and as the tornado got closer, he saw entire roofs of houses floating in the sky almost in slow motion, seemingly as weightless as feathers. As the horses ran frantically in the nearby field, Hite began to wonder if this was it for him. He had no idea where to take shelter. Everybody on the farm seemed to have vanished. It was just him and the horses.

With the tornado now just a few hundred yards away, Hite saw what looked to be a horse suddenly lifted in the air in the distance. He did the only thing he thought might save his life: He raced back to one of the barns, ran inside, and dove into a horse stall. He barely had time to cover his head before the storm was upon him, a roaring, swirling devil that consumed the building around him in seconds. Hite had never heard anything so loud in his life, and as he clutched a beam, he felt his ears popping as the storm began to suck at his body, tearing off his shoes and his shirt. The building collapsed in a heap of boards and mangled aluminum, and he felt himself beginning to tumble over and over, as if he were in a blender full of wood. It seemed to last forever. Suddenly he felt himself falling, buried by debris that seemed determined to drive him deeper and deeper into the muddy, wet ground. It was as if the storm were intent on literally digging his grave. There was no way he was going to survive this, just no way, he thought, as he felt his body being drilled deeper into the earth. And then, suddenly, it stopped.

 • • • 

A few blocks away at Briarwood Elementary, LaDonna Cobb saw her husband, Steve, rush through the side door leading into the interior hallway where she and her pre-K class were taking shelter in the main building. He had been outside looking at the storm. She was certain he was going to try once again to persuade her to leave with their daughters, who were taking shelter with their classmates, and flee the tornado, and the word “no” was forming on the tip of her tongue when she suddenly froze at the sight of his face. He wore a look she had never seen before in the more than fifteen years they had been together, something that was beyond fear. “Get out here now,” Steve ordered, in a tone that made her stomach drop.

Cobb nervously followed him out the door, and together they walked quickly down the sidewalk toward the side of the building. Outside there seemed to be a brief reprieve from the heavy rain and hail. For a moment Cobb wondered if her prayers had been answered and the storm was going to miss them. But then she peered around the corner of the building, and there it was: a towering black funnel so close and so huge it seemed to eat up the entire western sky. It was at least half a mile away, but even so she could see entire trees and houses swirling in the air around it. A building in the distance took a direct hit, and she saw it explode into splinters. She gasped, and her heart seemed to stop. It was too late to run. Briarwood was going to take a direct hit.

In a panic, Cobb and her husband turned and raced toward the first door they found, banging to be let in. It happened to be the outdoor entrance to their daughter Erin’s first-grade classroom, and inside the kids were gathered along an interior wall, crouched on their knees with their heads bowed to the floor. When the teacher let them in, Cobb rushed toward her youngest, dropped to the ground, and used her slender body to cover her and as many of her classmates as she could, gathering them underneath her in a tight embrace. She was determined to be a human shield between their tiny bodies and the horrible, ruthless storm that was coming for them. There was nothing to protect her, nothing to bear the weight of something crashing on her body as the storm hit, but she didn’t care. Like so many of her colleagues at Briarwood, all she could think about were the kids, their young lives barely started and now in such great danger. As the power suddenly went out, leaving them in the dark, the kids beneath her began to cry and shake in fear. “It’s going to be okay,” she said in a shaky voice, not really sure if she was telling the truth.

 • • • 

Outside, Shelly McMillin, the forty-eight-year-old Moore native who was Briarwood’s principal, was standing on the west side of the campus watching the tornado grow bigger and bigger as it aimed for the school. All she could think of was May 3, a storm she had survived by jumping into a bathtub at her house and pulling a mattress over her head. The television meteorologists had warned people in the path of that tornado that they could not survive unless they were underground. But McMillin had beaten the odds. She had been above ground on May 3 and had lived, even as her home and her neighborhood were blown away around her.

Now, facing down a tornado that looked every bit as menacing as the one she had encountered fourteen years earlier, McMillin could only think of that miracle. If she’d lived through the most dangerous tornado on record, maybe she and her students and teachers, who had no choice but to ride out the storm in the school, had more of a chance than Mike Morgan and the other guys on television were suggesting. As the storm drew closer, her mind shut off to any scenario other than making it through.
We can do this. We’ve got to do this,
McMillin thought, a mantra she began to repeat again and again in her head. It was as if someone had physically flipped a switch that shut out the fear and doubt and put her into survival mode. Still, as she ducked back into the building and raced to her office, she began to pray aloud. “Please, God, let it lift,” she pleaded to the heavens above. “Please let it lift.”

 • • • 

In the adjacent buildings teachers and parents were keeping watch through windows and side doors. They could see the sky had turned pitch-black. Startled by how eerily quiet it was, Amy Chase, a sixth-grade teacher, walked back to her classroom to look out a window that faced west. She shrieked as she saw giant chunks of debris flying in the air over the field adjacent to the school and ran as fast as she could back to the hallway. “It’s coming! It’s coming!” she screamed as she ran down the corridor, rushing to get back to her students. She began frantically yelling at the kids to put their backpacks over their heads, but she worried it wouldn’t be enough to protect them from what was coming, especially for the kindergartners who were crouched near her class. Their little bodies were so vulnerable. Growing more hysterical by the minute, Chase noticed a group of parents near the front-office windows and begged them to use their bodies to protect the kids. At first they just looked at her as if they didn’t comprehend what she was saying. “Lay on the babies!” Chase cried. “It’s coming!”

Suddenly the unmistakable roar of the tornado began to sound in the distance, growing ever closer as students began to scream in horror. Next door, in the building where the fourth- and fifth-grade classes were held, teachers caught a glimpse of the ominous funnel through the back window and began herding students into reinforced restrooms and closets. Like Chase, they were concerned that the hallways wouldn’t be safe enough. On a nearby wall the clock read 3:16
P.M
.

Seconds later something huge hit the roof of the school—cars and farm equipment that had been picked up by the funnel along the way now literally dropped out of the sky like bombs, causing parts of the roof to crack and cave under the pressure. “Hold on, hold on!” Cobb screamed as the building suddenly shook like a bomb. It was the sound of a twelve-thousand-gallon water tank, the size of a tiny submarine and weighing more than ten tons when it was empty, being thrown on top of a third-grade classroom in the next building. As the tank landed, it instantly bent the steel girders holding up the roof almost to floor level inside the classroom below. The entire school seemed to shake on impact. Just inches away, a teacher and her students were taking cover. The tank, and another just like it, had been ripped up like torn pieces of paper from their reinforced-cement bases at the Orr Family Farm and carried more than half a mile by the tornado before falling out of the sky. The other tank landed on a house a few blocks east of Briarwood, crushing it to bits.

Back in the hallway where Cobb’s pre-K class was taking shelter, the door that led out onto the sidewalk suddenly flew open. Outside was a swirling cyclone of wind and debris with a soundtrack of destruction so loud it drowned out the screams of the teachers, kids, and parents, whose faces were now contorted in absolute terror. Stacey Montgomery, the petite but sturdy teacher, crawled to the door and, struggling against the force of the winds, fought to pull it closed. She wedged her body into a corner and gripped the knob with all the strength she possessed to keep the door shut, her hands shaking and turning white with the pressure.

As the eye of the storm grew near, the wind began to suck at the door, pulling her almost horizontally in the air as parents, who were forcing their kids’ heads to the ground, watched in horror. Suddenly the door began to lurch outward, dramatically inhaled hinge by hinge by the tornado. As the door vanished, it almost took Montgomery with it, but somehow she clung to something in the hallway and fought her way back down the hall toward the kids. She felt her shoes sucked off one by one, but she kept going, refusing to let the storm take her. Finally back with the kids, she crawled on top of her students and clung to the floor and nearby wall for dear life, screaming at the top of her lungs for God to save their lives and take the storm away.

As the storm approached Briarwood, it officially became one of the strongest tornadoes captured on record. It was more than a mile wide and its winds were well in excess of 210 miles per hour—this made it an EF5 tornado on the Enhanced Fujita scale, the highest rating a storm can get. The school’s roof began to peel away under the pressure of the winds, and as the storm passed directly over the school, the lightning in the clouds above created an almost strobelike effect inside in the hallways, closets, nooks, and bathrooms where a few hundred students, teachers, and parents were desperately hoping to stay alive. “It’s almost over!” Robin Dziedzic, a fifth-grade teacher, yelled to her students as they rode out the storm in a tiny bathroom. But still the storm raged on, and to some it began to feel as though it would never end.

 • • • 

Squished in a closet in her office with several other administrative staff, McMillin found herself keeping a mental tally of the storm’s progress based on what she had gone through in 1999. She had already heard the grinding of its approach, followed by the loud crash of debris hitting the school. As her ears began to pop, signaling that the tornado was passing almost overhead, she found a strange solace in being able to physically feel the pressure of the storm on her body.
I’m still alive,
she thought, even as she began to hear the unbearable noise of the building being torn apart all around her.

In the first-grade classroom where Cobb had hunkered down with her husband and daughter, most of the roof was now gone and she could feel her body being sucked into the air. She clawed at the wall in an effort to gain traction against the storm while at the same struggling to keep her body firmly on top of the children beneath her. If she had to fight to stay grounded against the pull of the tornado, Cobb knew that if the wind were to get to the kids the twister would inhale their tiny frames in an instant. She couldn’t let that happen. “It’s going to be okay! It’s going to be okay!” she screamed, repeating herself as she grabbed at the wall with one hand, trying to brace herself, and shielded the kids, who were now crying out in terror, with the other. She could hear a boy underneath her calling out in anguish for his mother, and her heart ached. Suddenly, before she even realized what was happening, the wall Cobb was trying so hard to cling to collapsed on top of her, a pile of heavy cinder blocks that knocked her sharply in the head and buried her. Everything went black.