The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (17 page)

E
ven from 2 miles away Glenn Lewis could hear that unmistakable roar, a cross between the sound of a freight train and that of a jet engine. He’d heard it before, watching other tornadoes prey on Moore in the nearly two decades since he was first elected mayor. And every time he had hoped he’d never hear that awful sound again. But he had. Four times now he’d helped rebuild his hometown. Four times too many.

Lewis had seen things he had never imagined when he ran for mayor that he would ever see: stunned people crawling out of the rubble of their homes with their bodies impaled by jagged pieces of lumber like giant splinters and other gruesome injuries that looked like what you might expect to find on the front lines of a bloody civil war. These weren’t supposed to be things you saw here on the quiet, suburban streets of Moore, the epitome of small-town America. As he watched yet another tornado grind its way toward the heart of his city, he couldn’t help but stare in disbelief. Was this really happening to Moore again?

May 3 still haunted the mayor, as it did most people in town who had lived through it. It wasn’t that he went out of his way to think about it. A jeweler by trade who was only supposed to be at City Hall part time but often worked well beyond that, Lewis looked like an adult Big Boy statue come to life, with a round, sweet face that was often lit up with a jovial smile. He was easygoing by nature, known to embrace the bright side of bad situations. That’s how he’d been raised, and even in tough moments he always tried to ease the tension with his deadpan sense of humor. “I ran to clean up Moore, but I didn’t know I’d have to do it piece by piece,” he had joked after the ’99 tornado—a line he’d use again in different variations over the next fourteen years after other bouts of bad weather.

He was of the opinion that all you could do to get through the tears was try to laugh, pick yourself up, and move on. It was his gentle nature, his ability to be the rock that people could rely on in the most trying of times, that accounted for his having been reelected eight times unopposed since he first became mayor in 1994. Lewis loved Moore and would do anything for its people, and everybody in town knew it.

Moore had rebuilt after May 3, better than before, just as it had after every single other storm that had hit in the years since. But while the city had moved on, the storm had left invisible scars. By now Lewis was something of an expert on how to deal with the aftermath of a tornado, thanks to the kind of on-the-job training that no public servant anywhere in the world would ever want. When he went to mayoral conferences in other parts of the country—alone, since he didn’t actually have a formal staff, not even a secretary—people always approached him with a look of respect tinged with pity. It bugged him, though he was too nice to say anything. “How do you do it?” the East Coasters often asked, studying him with the curiosity they’d show a martian. “How can you live there?” Lewis would shrug and smile. “We actually have pretty great weather most of the time,” he’d say. They always laughed, even if they looked at him as though he were a bit crazy.

One bright side to all of this—and Lewis actively looked for it—was that he knew Moore would be ready when the next storm came. And deep down, as much as he wished otherwise, he had always known it would. Now here it was, a giant twister that was bigger than anything he’d ever seen—even the milewide ’99 tornado. And as he stood outside the back door of his jewelry store just south of Nineteenth Street along Interstate 35, it appeared to be coming right at him. Hadn’t Moore already been through enough? Was his city the unluckiest town in America?

All day he had been looped in on conference calls and e-mails between Steve Eddy, his old high-school friend, and other city employees, and all day, as he often did in the spring, he had hoped that Moore would be spared. Even when the emergency warnings went out alerting everyone that a storm was blowing up to the west of town, he’d prayed that somehow it might go away.

Though the city had risen again after the May 3 twister, memories of that day lingered, emotional scars that had never really healed. Lewis never forgot what it was like to drive through neighborhoods once so vibrant with life that looked as though they’d been leveled by an atomic bomb. Overnight Moore’s population had dropped precipitously when thousands of people had been forced to relocate, their homes and their entire lives blown away in an instant. Parts of the city resembled a ghost town. The streets didn’t look like streets anymore. It was just rubble as far as the eye could see, and when that was gone, it looked like the surface of the moon—empty and barren. No trees, no houses. Just dust and rocks and empty concrete slabs where homes used to be. It was the worst thing you could ever witness as a mayor, much less as a town son who loved his city too deeply to ever consider moving away. While more than half the people who had been hit came back and rebuilt in Moore, Lewis dreaded the idea of ever seeing anything like that again in his hometown.

He could still recall as though it were yesterday the odor of natural gas and cut wood and soil mixed with rain that had wafted through the air as the sun set on the most terrible day he had ever known. It had been the smell of every twister since, both large and small, that disturbing perfume of devastation. But on this Monday, as he watched the storm approach from the west, its greenish black clouds spreading across the sky like an ugly bruise, Lewis began to detect that awful aroma in the air around him. It was as if he could actually smell the tornado coming. But maybe it was all in his head. He didn’t know.

A few feet away, from inside the store, he could hear the sound of the television, which his staff had cranked up to full volume. One of the TV weathermen was imploring people in the path of the storm to immediately take cover. His employees had already heeded the call and were crowded into the store’s giant vault, which doubled as a safe room, squeezed in alongside their stock of intricate diamond engagement rings—“Oklahoma’s largest selection of engagement and bridal rings,” the shop’s ads bragged. But Lewis couldn’t bring himself to go inside. He couldn’t take his eyes off the dark clouds to the west. Even as he began to be pelted by hail and the wind whipped up, blowing the rain sideways, he stood there almost dumbstruck watching the approaching storm. He wished it were just a bad dream, that he would wake up and it would be gone. But as the ground began to vibrate around him from the roar and the motion of the twister, he knew it was all too real.

Lewis’s cell phone suddenly rang. It was his twenty-nine-year-old daughter, Laura, who had moved away long ago to Washington, D.C., where she worked as an intelligence analyst for the federal government. “Dad,” she told him in a firm voice, “you are about to get hit by a tornado. You need to go inside the vault.” Lewis couldn’t suppress a laugh, even at this horrible moment. How did she know he was standing outside? “What are you guys doing, watching me?” he teased her. But she wasn’t in the mood to joke. “Dad, you need to take cover now,” she scolded. “It’s headed right for you.”

Lewis hung up the phone, telling his daughter he loved her and promising her he would go to the vault, but as he inched toward the door, he still couldn’t stop staring at the massive twister, so close now that he could see giant chunks of debris flying in the air around it. From KOCO on the television inside he could hear the concerned voice of Damon Lane, a customer who’d come into the store more than a year ago to buy a diamond engagement ring for his future wife. Now the meteorologist was calling out Lewis’s store by name on television, warning that it was in the path of the storm. “Lewis Jewelers,” Lane declared in a stern voice. “You need to be in your tornado shelter immediately.”

If that wasn’t a sign, Lewis wasn’t sure what was. So he inched toward the back door, stealing one last glance at the storm. It seemed to be more violent than it had been just a few seconds before, tearing away at whole neighborhoods to the west like a rabid dog. And as he took that last look, Lewis heard the storm sirens that had been blaring suddenly go silent. He panicked and quickly called the city’s emergency operations office, which controlled the sirens. “You need to get those sirens back on,” he said, his quiet drawl so well known at City Hall that he didn’t even bother to identify himself. “The tornado is right here.” The woman on the other end of the line was quiet for a second. “They are on,” she told him.

Lewis paused and tried to make sense of how that could possibly be. And then horror swept over him as he realized what had happened: The tornado had destroyed the sirens. It was already in Moore. It was all really happening. He quickly hung up and ran to the vault as the storm drew ever closer.

 • • • 

At KOCO Damon Lane still hadn’t heard from his wife, Melissa, and though he was fighting to remain calm on air, he was beginning to feel more and more panicked. Suddenly, a few feet away, his phone lit up with a message, and Lane quickly tossed the broadcast over to one of his storm chasers in the field while he dashed off camera. To his relief, the message was from Melissa, telling him she’d made it home and was in the shelter. Traffic had been backed up for miles heading south into Moore, in part because of the raging storm ahead of the tornado. She’d only reached the city a few minutes earlier. And as she’d exited Interstate 35 to head east down Fourth Street, she could see the tornado in her rearview mirror looming ominously over the city.

Melissa, a former morning news anchor who’d moved from Dallas to be with her new husband, was well practiced at the art of remaining calm in times of crisis. It was Television 101. But on that Monday she couldn’t control the fear that raced through her body at the sight of the tornado. She slammed her foot on the car’s accelerator, speeding to get away from the storm, knowing she had only a few minutes at most to get home. Pulling into the driveway, she had barely had time to click open the electric door to the garage before the power went out. Now, as she told Lane by text message, she was in the shelter, but with only one of their dogs. Skylar, their eighty-pound husky, had bitten her when she tried to get him down the stairs of the underground cubby, so she’d locked him inside their pantry instead.

Lane’s heart sank. Judging just by the radar, the tornado grinding through Moore was the most dangerous storm he’d seen since he’d started working in television. He was horrified by the ominous live pictures that were coming in of the storm as his chasers raced to the east to stay ahead of it. Even over their scratchy cell-phone connections he could hear the roar of the storm—and they were at least half a mile to a mile ahead of it. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what it was like to be in the epicenter of that horrible swirling devil. It wasn’t just conjecture when he warned people in the path of the storm to get below ground. Lane increasingly didn’t see how anyone in the path of the storm could survive it—much less his dog, who was like a child to him. As the radar updated again, the tornado had moved ever so slightly to the north, putting it on track to go right over his home. Typing as fast as he could so he could jump back on camera, Lane begged his wife to try one more time to save their dog. “He’s going to die,” he wrote, warning her that the storm was coming but she still had time. “Put on gloves,” Lane pleaded. “Please save Skylar! I don’t want him to die.”

Over Channel 5’s airwaves, storm chaser Chance Coldiron was streaming live video of the tornado. It was a dark and ominous wall of debris as it approached his position at Santa Fe Avenue and SW Fourth Street in Moore. He was just northeast of Briarwood Elementary and only a few blocks away from Plaza Towers. “There’s a neighborhood addition here about to take a direct hit,” Coldiron called out, unable to disguise the alarm in his voice. Lane felt sick. He walked back on camera and stood before the green screen that projected the image of the storm on the Doppler radar. It was now rotating over Moore like a massive hurricane. And as he opened his mouth to speak, his voice was different from before. There was an edge that hadn’t been there minutes earlier, an audible tinge of anxiety that Lane had tried to keep in check but that had snuck out.
Keep it together, Lane,
he told himself.
Keep it together.

 • • • 

Back in Moore, Robert Romines was caught in a heavy, driving rain as he raced south and then west to get around the massive storm. He was still trying to get to his daughter’s school at 149th Street and May, which he feared had been hit by the tornado. His calls and texts to the staff at Wayland Bonds Elementary weren’t going through, and none of his colleagues had been able to reach them either. He prayed it was just the storm interrupting the cellular airwaves and not something worse.
Oh God, why is this happening?
Romines thought.
How can this be happening?

By now the truck he was driving was being dinged by huge chunks of hail, but Romines could barely hear it over the heavy beating of his own heart. The rain and wind were so fierce he could barely see out the windshield. He had the steering wheel in a death grip, grabbing it so tight his knuckles were white. He knew he was probably driving like a maniac, weaving around cars and taking side roads to dodge traffic and find a way around the storm, but he didn’t care. Nothing was going to stop him from getting to that school. In the passenger seat his colleague Jeff Horn tried again to call Michelle McNear, the principal at Wayland Bonds. All circuits were busy. Romines began to feel as if he couldn’t breathe.

Romines wasn’t unfamiliar with driving in storms. It was such a normal occurrence it probably should have been a part of the driving test in Oklahoma, but he had a few more skills than most in the art of navigating the weather. In fact, Romines was a proud weather junkie, and ever since he was a kid he had lived for the springtime in Oklahoma, when the biggest storms of the year would roll through. He had been storm chasing before storm chasing was cool, practically since the moment he’d gotten his license at the age of sixteen. Back then his parents had admonished him to stay away from storms, warning him that the weather could turn on you in an instant. And in the most convincing voice possible, he’d promised he would. But then, under the pretense of heading to a friend’s house, he’d secretly drive out west and watch the storms rise up and explode along the vast, open farmland. It was something he continued to do well into adulthood. “Be right back,” he’d tell his wife, Traci, and off he’d go. She never seemed to mind. It was who he was.