The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (18 page)

As for others who had grown up in Tornado Alley, storms had an allure for him that he couldn’t quite explain, an attraction that couldn’t be put into words. It wasn’t something he’d ever had to articulate. People here instinctively understood the appeal of stormy weather because most of them felt that way too. It was as if it were somehow ingrained in the collective DNA of an entire region to love thunderstorms and want to be near them.

Romines found something undeniably beautiful about the way the clouds drew up toward the heavens and turned the day as black as night, the way streaks of lightning shot across the sky and zipped toward the ground in unpredictable ways. He was drawn to the ominous clap of thunder, to that odd mix of fear and anticipation that it stirred up deep within him as he wondered what was to come. He found the smell of a coming thunderstorm intoxicating, that luxurious aroma of rain right before it began to fall. It was his favorite smell in the world.

Every so often he’d seen a funnel cloud emerge, slinking to the ground like a tempestuous belly dancer on a mission to seduce and destroy the land below. He couldn’t look away. He was drawn to it like a snake to a charmer—though he knew full well that the vortex had the ability to strike and kill and that he, as a mere mortal, would be powerless against it. In 1999 he’d been out of town at an education conference when news broke that Moore had been hit. He’d spent hours trying to reach his wife and family in a city where the lines of communication had been wiped out. He’d been luckier than most that day. Hours later he learned that his family was okay, but as he’d watched other storms form and dissipate since then, he’d thought of that terrible, sick feeling on May 3 as he wondered about the fate of the people he loved. Still he couldn’t bring himself to look away. Tornadoes fascinated him.

Now, as he cut a jagged path toward the west side of town, speeding past cars whose drivers had stopped to gawk at the storm, Romines briefly wondered if he wasn’t being punished somehow for how much he loved wild weather. How could he have found beauty in something that was so destructive?

On the radio he heard the voice of Gary England, the man who had guided him through so many storms before. He could hear the alarm in England’s voice. The storm wasn’t letting up. It was only getting stronger. It was now on 149th Street approaching Santa Fe Avenue, England said. Romines’s heart sank. That was where Briarwood Elementary was. And to the east of that was Plaza Towers, led by Amy Simpson, whom he’d known since childhood. “This is a critical situation,” England continued, the unease in his voice echoing ominously through the car. “Take your tornado precautions. . . . Get below ground, if you can.” But Romines knew the kids couldn’t. In those old buildings there was nowhere to go but the hallways, closets, and bathrooms. He prayed they would be enough.

As Romines turned west, the rain suddenly let up and he could see the funnel. It was the biggest, scariest thing he’d ever seen, a mile wide or more as it hovered over the entire mass of land between SW Fourth and Nineteenth Streets ahead of him. He slowed the truck as he and Horn waited to see which way the storm would go to avoid being hit. As they did, his phone let out a ding. It was a text message from the counselor at Wayland Bonds. The school had narrowly escaped a direct hit, and Avery and everyone else were okay. Romines felt relief, but it was fleeting. Looking at where the storm was, he was certain Briarwood had been hit, and Plaza Towers either had been or was about to be. As they watched, the storm seemed to slow down, taking its time to destroy everything in its path.

Romines inched the car a little farther to the west, as the storm appeared to be heading north of them. As it got closer to Interstate 35, he could see cars being tossed around inside the funnel, picked up like tiny Hot Wheels, the toy cars he had played with as a boy. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. At that moment Romines knew he would never love tornadoes again.

T
hey crowded into the bathtub just as they had practiced only days before, but as the house began to creak and the ground began to shudder, Laurinda Vargyas wondered if it would be enough. Outside the pounding rain and hail had stopped, but she could hear the ghastly roar of the storm. It sounded like a freight train, just as she had always heard people describe it. Vargyas had no idea what to expect. This was her first tornado—the one she had hoped would never come.

The thirty-year-old mother of four was from Kern County, California, a place where so many Oklahomans had gone to escape the terrible disaster of the Dust Bowl eighty years before. But like many Californians in recent years, she and her husband, Phillip, had done a reverse migration. When he’d retired from the navy in 2010, they had left Ridgecrest, California, for Oklahoma City, where there were more jobs and a better quality of life. Oklahoma’s wild weather had come up as they discussed their future. Could they really live in a place that was so dangerously stormy? But Phil was from Houston—a city regularly pounded by tropical storms that blew in off the Gulf of Mexico—and in California they faced other risks: wildfires and drought and the threat of earthquakes. The Indian Wells Valley, where they lived while Phil worked at the nearby naval base at China Lake, was considered long overdue for “the big one.” A natural disaster, it seemed, could happen anywhere.

In the end the occasional threat of a tornado was trumped by pure economics. It was simply cheaper to live in Oklahoma, and it hadn’t been hit as hard by the recession as many states. There was a hopefulness, a sense that things were getting better, that you didn’t find in central California. Phil quickly found a job as an IT manager in Oklahoma City, and the family moved. He made just enough so that they could rent a nice house and Laurinda could stay at home with the kids. They weren’t rich by any means, and some months were tougher than others, but they had a good life. They lived in a comfortable home on 147th Street, just over the Moore city line in a good neighborhood full of families and kids. They were a block away from Briarwood Elementary, where their oldest children—Damon, eleven, and Aria, eight—went to school. Their daughter Karrina, just a few weeks shy of turning five, went to prekindergarten classes there in the morning while Laurinda stayed home with their newest addition, Sydnee, an angelic baby girl who had been born the previous October.

Sydnee was their “Okie,” as Phil called her, because she was born in Oklahoma. A squirming, laughing little bug of a child, she was the delight of the family—“the happiest baby alive,” according to everyone who met her. Even Karrina, who Phil and Laurinda had worried might be a little jealous, adored her little sister and treated her like her own little doll. They dressed in matching pink and purple—the same hues as Karrina’s beloved Minnie Mouse bedroom set. They looked like tiny princesses, adorned in rainbows and hearts and bright patterns that accentuated their sweet faces. Like Damon and Aria, they had the bright smiles and angelic laughter that made all the sacrifices a parent has to make for their kids worthwhile. Phil and Laurinda doted on their children and would stop at nothing to protect them.

The Vargyases had been diligent in practicing what to do in case of a tornado, just as they had done fire drills to make sure everyone knew their role. Maybe it was his military background, but Phil strongly believed, and his wife agreed, that it was important to prepare for the worst-case scenarios. So when the storm sirens began to blare, Laurinda grabbed Sydnee and Karrina and hustled toward the bathroom, as they had done in the drills. It was the safest spot in the house, since they didn’t have a storm shelter. She and her mother, LaVisa, who had moved from California to Oklahoma in January to be closer to her daughter and grandkids, used their bodies to shield the little ones. And as they sat in the tub waiting for the worst, Laurinda worried about the fate of her older kids, who were at Briarwood Elementary down the street.

Karrina was scared, too young to understand a tornado but old enough to know that what was happening wasn’t good. Laurinda and her mother did their best to comfort her, rubbing her back and telling her it was going to be okay. Laurinda didn’t like to see her like this, her sweet little girl who spent hours in the backyard dancing and twirling without a care in the world. The previous fall, just before Sydnee had been born, she and Phil had taken Karrina to see a Disney on Ice show at the annual state fair. And there, as her favorite Disney princesses glided across the ice in front of her, Karrina had turned to her parents and excitedly told them she was going to be a figure skater when she grew up. Her parents didn’t have the money to pay for lessons, but they would someday, Phil had promised. Now all Laurinda wanted was a chance to see her daughter on the ice. It had to happen. Life couldn’t be so cruel as to take that promise away.

Suddenly, with a thunderous howl, the tornado was upon them. As Laurinda and her mother clutched the tiny little girls and each other, the house began to shake and split apart around them, peeling away piece by piece in the terrible winds. Even over the deafening roar, Laurinda could hear and feel the cracking of wood and glass as her body began to be pummeled with bricks and boards and everything else the storm could throw at her. She squeezed her daughters closer, holding them as tightly as she could, praying the storm would go away. But suddenly, before her mind could even process what was happening, Laurinda was sucked into the air and her two little girls ripped from her grasp. She felt herself airborne, tumbling again and again forward and backward and sideways as her body was beaten and slammed by whatever was in the air around her. She was banged in the head, and something was ripping at her skin, and for a moment it felt like her body might explode from the sudden pressure of the storm. Then, just as suddenly as she had been picked up, the storm ruthlessly spit her out, and she landed with a massive thud on the ground in the middle of a neighborhood that she didn’t recognize. Opening her eyes, she saw only piles of rocks and sticks as far as the eye could see. It was as though she had been transported through some horrifying portal from her quiet neighborhood into a war zone.

Dazed and bleeding profusely from deep cuts on her head and body, Laurinda tried to sit up against a wall of wind that almost threatened to take her again. The tornado still seemed to be lingering right over her, a massive funnel of cloud and debris that stretched high into the heavens. The air was thick with the remains of the houses that had once stood around her; insulation and boards and other unidentifiable objects pummeled her as she tried to stand up. She began to look around her, scouring the landscape for any sign of her two girls. Over her right shoulder she saw the mangled body of her mother, battered and bloody, her scalp almost ripped off. She looked like she was dead, but as Laurinda crawled to her, she saw that she was still breathing ever so faintly and trying to talk.

Laurinda struggled to her feet against the winds. Things continued to fly at her as the storm seemed determined to take her down. She grabbed a blanket she found on the ground and covered her mother, hoping she could survive until help came. And then she turned and frantically began looking for her daughters. They had to be nearby. Her mind was muddled, and she sensed she was in shock. She could feel the warm ooze of blood from somewhere, but she was numb to the pain. Where were her girls? Where had the storm taken them?

That’s when she saw Sydnee in the distance, her tiny seven-month old baby, her little body usually squirming like a happy worm, now lying painfully still on the concrete driveway of a neighbor’s house a few yards away. Laurinda ran to her, dodging lumber and insulation that continued to fly in the air, and as she got closer, she realized her daughter, her baby whose life had barely begun, was dead. Laurinda fell her to knees as she picked up Sydnee’s lifeless little body and held her close.

Sydnee had only just started to enunciate words, her sweet gurgles and squeals forming little bursts of “Mamas” and “Dadas.” Her first word was “Bubba,” for her brother Damon, who had spent hours cradling her, the protective older brother of a pack of young sisters. To the west Laurinda could see that Briarwood was nothing but rubble. Were he and Aria gone too? Where was Karrina? Her mind could not seem to focus. It all seemed so unreal. What had happened?

She held her baby to her chest, rocking her as people slowly began to emerge from the debris and survey the apocalyptic landscape around them. There was a strong smell of natural gas punctuated by the odor of disturbed earth and rain. But Laurinda was aware of none of this. All she could focus on was her still little baby who had crawled for the first time only the day before, right in their living room, which was now gone, along with everything else they had.

They had been watching the storm coverage the night before—she and Phil and her mom and the kids. Tornadoes had erupted to the east, toward Shawnee, and that’s when Sydnee had begun to coo and shuffle her little body around on the floor. Everybody had stopped to watch, to take in this precious moment that happens only once in a child’s life, and Phil, his face beaming with the same joy he’d felt in watching his other kids take their first steps, had suddenly laughed. Sydnee was definitely their Okie, he’d said with a chuckle. Only an Oklahoma baby would crawl for the first time when there where tornadoes on the ground nearby.

Now, not even a day later, a tornado had come and cruelly taken Sydnee away. As the deadly funnel continued to grind its way east, all Laurinda could do was sit in the driveway as it began to rain and hold her lifeless little girl and wonder what had happened to her other kids.

A
s the twister prepared to cross from Oklahoma City into Moore, it suddenly slowed to an excruciating crawl, just as it had right before it had charged east from Newcastle some twenty minutes earlier. But this time, instead of mostly empty farmland, the storm hovered over the neighborhood east of Briarwood Elementary, the most densely populated area on its track so far. It seemed to want to take its time as it violently devoured everything within a mile radius, lingering as it chewed up houses and cars and trees and spit them out, only to suck them up and put them through the grinder once again. As it inched forward, it left the landscape behind it virtually unrecognizable.

Though it had decreased in speed, going from about 40 miles per hour to about 15 or 20, the tornado became stronger than ever, as if eating away at the life of a city was somehow fueling its brutality. By now its winds and rotation were so demonic that entire lawns were vacuumed away in seconds. The ground underneath was scoured so clean of loose dirt that the vortex began to leave deep scars that resembled crop circles indented in the earth.

Every tree within reach of its fierce winds was shorn of its leaves and limbs—and in some cases its bark. Giant, leafy oak trees that had withstood storms for years were quickly carved down to jagged little stumps. Entire homes were swept from their slabs in seconds, the debris chopped and chewed into fragments.

Even with all the attention paid to them in recent years, tornadoes were still a mysterious phenomenon—and this one was no different. As it neared Santa Fe Avenue, houses on some blocks were inhaled and then redeposited in neat, uniform rows like loose hay swept up in a farm field ready to be harvested into bales. It was as if the storm suddenly felt the need to be polite and to organize its mess. Scientists were at a loss to explain why or how it did this. Nobody got close enough to see firsthand because it was simply too dangerous.

But they knew enough to know that windrowing, as it was referred to, happened only when tornadoes were at their most fierce, with winds of at least 200 miles per hour. According to the radar, the winds inside this storm were now hitting around 210 miles per hour as it pounded the neighborhood around Briarwood, though they were probably far stronger. Given its distance, the Doppler radar could only calculate the winds at the top of the storm, and in the rare instances when scientists had been able to get close enough to a vortex to measure its exact wind speed, they had often found the gusts closer to the ground to be much stronger and more violent.

Nobody could get close enough to really know precisely how bad the winds were. Like many of the teams of professional chasers, most of the scientists who fan out to study the storms that regularly erupt during the Oklahoma springtime had headed south, believing the likelihood of tornadoes was stronger in that direction. Now some of these, like Howard Bluestein and his team of OU students, were racing back north, and even though they weren’t close enough to get a comprehensive read, the tornado heading toward Moore was so strong they were able to pull some limited ground data on it even from more than 60 miles away.

But those in the immediate path of the tornado didn’t need an exact wind reading to understand how bad it was. They could hear it in the way the structure around them creaked ominously and feel how the ground trembled as the storm approached. And then, just as quickly, it was hell on earth as they were caught up in a whirling gyre that latched on to its victims and refused to let go.

 • • • 

At a house on Broadway Circle, a block from where Moore officially began, Shannon Quick was huddled in a dark closet with her mother-in-law, Joy; her two young boys, Jackson, eight, and Tanner, thirteen; and their plump bull terrier, Luke, when the tornado approached. As was true for many in the neighborhood, a storm shelter was an indulgence the family hadn’t been able to afford, and when it was too late to escape, they had taken cover in the only place they could—an interior closet. There was no reason to believe it wouldn’t protect them now.

Shannon and her family were only hours away from leaving on vacation. They were going to Virginia, and she had checked out her boys early from school to pack. But now they were in the path of a tornado, and as the winds engulfed them, the house began to crumble like a cracker crushed in the ball of someone’s fist. In the closet the walls began to disintegrate around them—one wall went and then the other. The boys had been wearing their plastic Little League helmets—placed on their heads by their worried mother, who was heeding Gary England’s advice to gird the kids for battle against the storm. Suddenly the helmets were sucked from their heads, leaving them defenseless against the debris around them. And then, just as suddenly, they were all sucked up, catapulted through the air by the tornado for what seemed like an eternity before being viciously hurled back to the ground.

An hour or so earlier, Shannon had been checking items off her to-do list before leaving town. Now she was sprawled on the ground near what used to be her house bleeding to death, the midsection of her body sliced fully open by something that had impaled her as she was tossed around by the tornado. Nearby Jackson lay almost motionless, his tiny body pulverized by the storm. The skin of his right buttock had been torn away; his pelvis was crushed and one of his legs broken. He was losing blood fast. Luke, his beloved dog, moaned and whimpered nearby, injured so badly he would have to be put to sleep.

Shannon’s older son, Tanner, who had somehow escaped with only cuts and bruises, roused his grandmother, who was unconscious on the ground nearby. Joy, who was sixty-one, was seriously injured too. “Ma! Ma!” he cried, shaking her a bit. The boys had called her “Ma” since they were small, when they hadn’t been able to pronounce the word “Grandma.” She had a giant hole in her right arm where blood was gushing out, and one of her heels was crushed and broken. But seeing the panicked look on her grandson’s face, she found the strength to rise in spite of the pain and push herself up off the ground. She ran to her daughter-in-law, who kept repeating her boys’ names in a voice so faint Joy could barely hear her over the roar of the storm. “Tanner, Jackson, Tanner, Jackson,” she slowly whispered again and again, struggling to speak. The forty-year-old coughed and her voice began to gurgle as blood filled her lungs. “They are okay. They are okay,” Joy told her, trying to comfort her and keep her calm. “Just lie still.” Nearby Tanner sobbed as he looked at his mother, so badly injured. No child was supposed to see his parent like this.

Joy stood up and frantically screamed for help. But there was nobody. They were in the middle of a wasteland, and the tornado was still so close that debris was floating in the air around them. She began to pray, calling out to God to keep her daughter-in-law alive until someone could help them. It didn’t seem right that Shannon, who lived to take care of her kids, wouldn’t see them grow up. It couldn’t be that she was being ripped out of their lives like this, in such a horrid, despicable way. A man, a paramedic, finally ran up, and Shannon grabbed his pant leg as he talked to her, trying to keep her alert until they could get her out of there. But her hand slowly went limp. She died right there on the ground, her face wet from the rain that began to fall in thick droplets from the sky.

 • • • 

The tornado was now such a monster that KFOR’s Jon Welsh, sitting a mile to the south and several thousand feet in the air, could hear the roar of the storm over the sound of his headset, which was designed to protect him from the high-frequency pitch of the engine of his helicopter. The storm was even louder than the helicopter, something that had never happened before.

His wife had finally texted him to let him know she was in the shelter with their kids. Welsh was relieved, but his relief was only momentary. Before his eyes the storm was getting bigger and bigger. He knew he had to keep a mental distance from what was happening in order to maintain control—just as he had when he was operating in war zones overseas. But the tornado was so massive as it took aim at the most heavily populated parts of Moore that he could barely believe it. In his heart he knew that people were dying, and it made him feel sick. “This thing is not letting up,” he told Mike Morgan.

On the KFOR radar the center of the tornado was now a huge black hole, representing the storm’s apocalyptic winds and massive quantity of debris. Between that and the ominous pictures from Welsh and his other chasers, Morgan kept thinking of May 3—not just because of the path of the storm but also because he still worried there were people who weren’t listening to the warnings. It wasn’t just the tornado’s savage winds that killed but also people’s reaction to the storm, or their inaction. So many people had died needlessly by waiting too long to take shelter or by not bothering to take cover at all. The thought of that happening again was driving Morgan crazy. Why wouldn’t they just listen and get out of there?

While Gary England tried his best to conceal his trauma from the public, Morgan freely admitted to people that he thought he might have a little PTSD from all the bad weather he’d seen and the stress of worrying about viewers in the path of the storm. Though he and England could barely conceal their distaste for each other, they shared that lingering concern about whether they were doing everything they possibly could to save lives. England, who obsessively struggled to keep cool on air, addressed the torture more privately; Morgan had a more frantic air about him, which he now struggled to keep in check.

By now Morgan had played all the cards in his deck in an effort to convince people in Moore of how much danger they were in. He had likened the storm to the May 3 tornado—and even those who hadn’t been around knew what that meant. He’d urged people again and again to get underground or “get out of the way”—warning them that an interior closet or bathroom wouldn’t be sufficient to protect them from the tornado’s intense winds. What more could he do?

His voice had an anxious edge to it, and as the storm crossed Santa Fe Avenue and officially entered the city of Moore, he began to sound almost frustrated as he pleaded with viewers who might be in its trajectory to understand how dire the situation was. Those in the path of the storm should be evacuated by now based on the station’s warnings, Morgan declared, a hint of irritation in his voice. And then he began to sound like an upset parent lecturing a child who had misbehaved, repeating himself as he desperately tried to convince people that they were running out of time. “You cannot delay. You can’t think. You can’t delay. You’ve got to act!” Morgan said in a voice that verged on panic. “You’ve got to act! You can’t think or delay. You’ve got to act. And act. And act to save your life and your loved ones’ lives. You’ve got to act!”

For many it was already too late. As the tornado entered the housing addition adjacent to Plaza Towers, entire blocks of homes were wiped out almost instantly by the storm’s horrific winds. Some residents had fled to the small number of storm shelters in their backyards, but others took cover in their homes, praying their tiny closets and bathrooms would be enough. For some they weren’t. On a single block along SW Fourteenth Street at Ginger Avenue, six people in neighboring homes died as the tornado picked off their houses one by one.

Toward the middle of the block, inside a quaint little blue and white ranch-style home, Gina Stromski, a fifty-one-year-old retiree, was crouched in a closet with her beloved dog, Wylie, riding out the storm. A widow who was such a rabid OU football fan she had an entire room of her house dedicated to Sooner memorabilia, she was on the phone with her brother-in-law as the tornado closed in. “Maybe it will turn,” she said hopefully—and then the phone went dead. Next door Cindy Plumley, a forty-nine-year-old nurse, was riding out the storm in her bathroom with her daughter and two grandkids when the house collapsed on top of them, killing her instantly. Earlier that afternoon she had been planning a getaway to mark her fiftieth birthday the following month. She had wanted to take the kids to Disneyland.

Down the street two homes were completely swept off their foundations by the storm. Inside one was Randy Smith, a quiet thirty-nine-year-old electrician who was planning to attend his son Dylan’s graduation from Southmoore High School that Saturday. His family had tried to reach him again and again ahead of the storm, but he hadn’t picked up his phone. A video-game junkie, he often wore headphones when he played, and afterward his father, Terry, wondered if he’d been too engrossed to notice that the weather outside had turned.

A few doors down Tawauna Robinson and her fiancé, Leslie Johnson, had taken shelter inside a closet at a home they shared with her twenty-five-year-old son Lamarr. Tawauna, a vivacious woman who loved life even on bad days, had only recently moved to Moore from St. Louis to be closer to her son. They loved to dance, and together she and Lamarr would have impromptu dance parties in his tiny rental house, just as they had when he was a toddler back in Missouri. On that Monday Lamarr, who was out of town, could hear the fear in his mother’s voice when she called to tell him about the storm. A woman of strong faith, Tawauna was praying the Lord would protect her and Pee Wee, as Johnson was known among his closest friends. No matter what, God had been good to her.

A few hours later her body was found near her fiancé’s in the twisted rubble of their home.

Across the street from Gina Stromski’s house, Rick Jones, a fifty-four-year-old postal worker, had taken cover in a tiny closet inside the beige and white house where he’d ridden out the 1999 tornado. Jones was a simple man who lived a largely solitary life. He wasn’t married and he worked nights sorting mail. A few months before the storm he bought a black Corvette, the flashiest thing he had ever owned. After the storm a stranger who had rushed to Moore to help rescue victims found Jones’s body in the closet, where the house had collapsed upon him. A Bible was at his knees. His beloved Corvette was down the block, mangled beyond recognition.