The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (22 page)

T
ime moves slowly when you think you are about to die. Seconds become minutes; minutes become like hours. A single moment, once so fleeting, suddenly feels like an eternity.

Buried under the rubble of what used to be the hallway outside her third-grade classroom at Plaza Towers Elementary, Jennifer Doan found every passing minute more agonizing than the last. She couldn’t move, and she could barely breathe. All she wanted to do was wipe her face free of the dust and debris that covered her eyes and mouth, but with the exception of being able to wiggle her left arm a tiny bit, she was completely incapacitated, pinned underneath what seemed to be a mountain of rocks and steel in absolute darkness.

The pressure of the debris on her body seemed to grow ever more excruciating, but every time she tried to move, a sharp jolt of pain shot through her body. It was the worst pain she had ever felt in her life, but it was what was happening in her head that was the real torture, the dark thoughts that she couldn’t escape. Was this how she was going to die? Was this how her life was really going to end? It was all she could think about.

Doan couldn’t move, but her mind was painfully active, thinking of everything that she didn’t want to lose. She pictured her two young girls, ages six and three. She thought of the baby that she carried inside her, a tiny being whose life had not even had a chance to begin. She had been so happy, recently engaged to her longtime boyfriend, Nyle. She loved her job and her students. Everything finally seemed to be coming together after a rough few years that had included a divorce from the father of her two girls. Now, under the rubble, Doan worried it was all lost: Her baby. Her family. Her students. Her life. All possibly taken away in an instant by a ruthless monster that she’d had no chance of even fighting against.

To Doan the tornado seemed to have been over Plaza Towers forever—though in reality it was only a few minutes, if that. In the whirl of it all the students closest to her—Xavier Delgado, Porter Trammell, and Nicolas McCabe—had been torn away from her grasp. Once the storm had passed, Doan could hear the muffled screams and cries of students who, like her, were buried in debris, and she tried to call to them. But as she waited and wondered if someone would come to rescue her and her class, the cries slowly faded out, replaced by something even more terrifying: total silence. The physical pain she felt was suddenly surpassed by almost suffocating mental anguish: Had she just listened to her kids die? Suddenly she felt something move near her. It was Porter, pinned to her right, who was squirming and trying to free himself. He began to scream. “I think Nicolas is dead,” he said, referring to his classmate next to him. Doan struggled to breathe.

With every bit of feeling within her, she wanted to rise up and throw off the mountain of debris that had buried her and find her students and get them out. She wanted to claw at the rocks until her fingers bled and to find the bright young smiles that had reminded her every day of why she had become a teacher. She wanted to find the kids whose lives had barely begun, take them in her arms, wipe their tears, and tell them that it would be okay and that they were safe and that this was just one very bad day. But she couldn’t move, and she increasingly couldn’t breathe. She felt totally helpless. And the longer she waited, the more worried she became—about her kids and about herself and about the city surrounding her.

What had happened outside this concrete tomb she was encased in? Was anyone coming? Was this where her life was going to end? Why had this happened to Moore again?

 • • • 

A few feet away Emily Eischen, the second-grade teacher, had slowly risen to her feet, staring in a daze at what was left of the back building. The roof above their heads was gone, and the ceiling had been replaced with a tangle of cords, wires, and jagged metal that hung precariously above them. She stood in a mess of debris, some so deep it came up to the children’s waists. There was broken glass and bricks and books and pieces of classroom furniture that had been torn apart by the storm. She and her students were wet from the rain and covered in mud and pieces of the building, but aside from a few scratches they all seemed okay. Their nerves were jittery. Only a few minutes earlier the storm sirens had started to wail again, scaring the kids and striking fear in the hearts of the teachers, who wondered if they could survive a second strike. But to their relief, the sirens suddenly went off. Outside it was eerily quiet, but silence had never sounded so good.

Only moments earlier Eischen had made her peace with God. She was ready to go if that was what the Lord wanted. But he had spared her and the kids. She looked up saw a little girl, one of her students, with her eyes closed and her hands clasped in prayer. Eischen’s eyes flooded with tears. She hadn’t been the only one relying on her faith, and suddenly all she could think about was life. She wanted to get out and live her life to the fullest, to never, ever waste a minute.

A few feet away second-grade teacher Shelly Calvert had leaped to her feet, hugging and kissing her kids. “We made it!” she shouted. “We’re okay!” She had been certain they were going to die as she had watched the tornado tear into the building. Both she and Eischen began looking for a way to get out. To their left the building had collapsed, blocking an exit that would have led them to the front of the school. Almost simultaneously they looked to the right, where the back door leading to the playground had been. Suddenly they realized for the first time that a heavy cinder-block wall had collapsed inward, right where the third graders had been. Calvert began shouting for Doan and her students. There was no sound, no movement.

Just seconds earlier Eischen and Calvert had been so joyous, so grateful to be alive, but now they felt terrified and helpless. They feared what had happened to their colleagues and the other kids, but they tried to remain calm. They needed to get their own students to safety. They needed to find a way out.

A
t this point the tornado began to do strange things. Over the last hour Gary England had watched its horrifying transformation from a tiny wisp of a cloud into a terrifying stovepipe of a monster that loomed larger than life over Moore. He had seen so many tornadoes over the course of his career, but he knew he wouldn’t ever forget this one. As it moved into east Moore, the twister almost seemed to taunt him—daring him to think it might be over before carelessly flaunting its strength. Over the course of several miles it subsided, then grew big again. As it headed toward Draper Lake, it once again appeared to be weakening just before suddenly swelling back into a larger-than-life stovepipe fed by debris swirling hundreds of feet in the air. At the same time it picked up speed, suggesting it wasn’t finished tormenting central Oklahoma.

The storm’s updraft was so strong that it acted like a vacuum, sucking evidence of its destruction high up into the clouds, farther than the human eye could see. Panicked calls were streaming in to the local television stations and the National Weather Service. In Midwest City, a little over 10 miles northeast of Moore, the northern edge of the storm system had started to rain down massive chunks of hail, some as big as baseballs. But the callers reported something unusual: Mixed in with the hail were papers, pictures, books, and shoes. They worried that a tornado had somehow dropped undetected upon them, but what they were seeing was debris from Moore that had been sucked up by the twister and circulated around in that mysterious upper atmosphere of the storm that scientists still know so little about. The air above the tornado had been so unstable and violent when it hit Moore that the debris had bounced around in the clouds until it was abruptly spit out miles away, far from the actual destruction.

Back in Moore an adjacent section of the storm began to rotate—threatening to produce a second funnel almost right next to the one that was already on the ground. One tornado was a nightmare, but two? England stared with dread at the images beaming back from Jim Gardner’s helicopter. He began to tick off the cities farther east in the path of the storm, including Bethel Acres and Shawnee. If it didn’t lift, the tornado was going to come very close to hitting the same areas that had been devastated by Sunday night’s storm. England thought of the people there, who were likely trying to recover what belongings they could from their destroyed homes. Now a second, even stronger tornado was bearing down on them. Where would they go? What would they do? Would they even have ample warning? It seemed like an especially cruel move.

 • • • 

Down the road at KOCO Damon Lane had meticulously tracked the tornado block by block as it aimed for his house, where Melissa was in their underground shelter. KOCO had one of the best Doppler radars on the market, and Lane had kept his cool as best he could as he’d watched the center of the tornado pass within a block of his house. But no radar was perfect, and he had no confirmation about the fate of his wife or their home. He kept stepping off camera, sending her texts and trying to call her, but she wasn’t picking up. He tried the neighbors. There was no response. His producers started to try to reach his wife too, but cell service in Moore appeared to be out, and as the minutes ticked by, Lane grew more and more anxious.

Chance Coldiron, who lived a few blocks from Lane, finally got through to the station. He didn’t bother to hide his anxiety about the destruction he had just witnessed. “That tornado came down just right along Fourth Street or moved just south,” he told Lane on live television, a tone of resignation in his voice. “I lost my house, I’m pretty sure. Maybe yours is gone.”

Lane’s heart began to race; he felt himself propelled by a mix of adrenaline and disbelief. He knew he wasn’t the only one who had something personal at stake. He thought of all the people who were watching him, worried about their own families in the path of the storm, and he willed himself to keep composed, to be “in the zone,” as he put it. But he was only human, and as he dashed back on camera, his voice was a little more breathless, his body language a bit more jumpy. Off camera the studio, which has been a busy hive of activity only seconds before, had grown eerily quiet and still. Everyone was staring in shock at Lane, marveling at how well he was keeping it together. They had never seen anything like it—not even when the station itself had been hit.

 • • • 

With the tornado grinding its way east toward Midwest City, KWTV began showing more footage of damage on the ground in Moore. Watching the feed, England’s heart sank. The camera shot was from Santa Fe Avenue, just west of Plaza Towers, and it looked like a war zone. The four-lane street was impassable, blocked by snapped telephone poles and downed power lines. People were running frantically toward houses that looked as though they had been hit by bombs. It barely resembled a neighborhood street. The reporter on the ground announced that a police officer had confirmed that at least one elementary school had taken a direct hit, and children had been inside. It was the nightmare scenario that everyone had feared.

By then the station was airing footage of the damage in Moore side by side with Gardner’s live feed of the tornado. On the right side of the screen the storm seemed to come almost to a dead stop, swirling in place like a top over a section of mostly empty farmland just west of the lake. Again it appeared to weaken—but England was still wary. Slowly the funnel shrank in size, even as uprooted trees and bits of houses continued to sail in the air half a mile in every direction around it. From Gardner’s vantage point, the tornado began to move almost in slow motion as it gradually transformed into a tiny funnel. For several agonizing seconds it undulated back and forth like a dancing cobra as it very deliberately lifted off the ground and inched back up into the dark clouds—moving ever so slowly, as if choreographed to heighten the tension.

At KWTV people in the studio were literally holding their breaths, wondering if the deadly vortex would lash out again like a venomous snake. By then the tornado had been on the ground for forty minutes, traveling nearly 15 miles from Newcastle straight through the most populated parts of Moore. England had no idea exactly how big the funnel had been, but he knew from the radar that the storm had been more than a mile wide at moments, with winds exceeding 200 miles per hour. If those stats held up, it would register as one of the strongest tornadoes on record and would give Moore the dubious distinction of being the only city to have been hit twice by such devastating storms.

England wanted to believe that the tornado had finally lifted, but he knew how tricky storms could be. Just because one funnel had gone back up into the clouds didn’t mean another one wasn’t coming. He didn’t trust the storm, and he told viewers in its path to remain on guard because they were still in danger. Meanwhile the radar lit up with other storms stretching a long diagonal across the state from the south toward Wichita Falls, Texas, up toward Tulsa—right along the Interstate 44 corridor. The forecasts had been mostly accurate. Strong storms had erupted to the south, just as the early projections had stated, but nothing like the monster that had just hit Moore. England’s early hunch that the worst of the weather would hit close to Oklahoma City had been dead on. He wished to God that he hadn’t been right.

 • • • 

An hour south Howard Bluestein and his team of researchers from the University of Oklahoma were positioned right where the initial forecasts had said the worst storms would hit, but so far it had been a series of dead ends. Though he loathed the idea of pursuing a tornado in an urban environment given all the traffic from amateur storm chasers, Bluestein had nonetheless felt a tinge of disappointment as he and his team had watched the storm that would hit Moore begin to blow up on radar. The storm had developed incredibly quickly, more so than most tornadoes, and it could have been a good research opportunity. Still, it had become so big and violent that his mobile Doppler, positioned 50 miles away, had picked up some limited data on the storm. Few people in the world knew more about tornadoes than Bluestein, but as he sat in his truck listening to initial news reports of widespread destruction in Moore, he could only think of how little he truly understood them. Like everyone, he was perplexed by the same mystery: What made Moore so unlucky? It was a question he wasn’t sure science could answer.

 • • • 

In the sky over Moore, Jim Gardner and KFOR’s Jon Welsh hovered in their helicopters, waiting to see if another tornado would drop to the ground. After a few minutes they broke away, racing to pick up the storm’s trail of destruction and follow it back to the west side of town. From the sky they had seen only hints of what the storm had done—through intense power flashes and gigantic pieces of debris that had flown through the air.

Welsh flew toward his house, off Fourth Street, where his wife and kids had ridden out the storm in a cellar. He was relieved to see it was still standing. But his relief quickly turned to remorse as he began to see massive destruction beneath him. He flew over Highland East Junior High, only a short drive from his house, where the gymnasium had been wiped from the slab. In the surrounding neighborhood houses had been flattened into giant piles of bricks and wood. On Interstate 35 Welsh saw cars that had been picked up and tossed like toys. Some were flattened and fused together, as if they had been crushed for scrap metal at the dump. Only an hour earlier Moore had been lush and green—in the full flush of spring. But now the lawns and foliage had been sucked away, and from the sky everything that remained appeared to glow with a tint of slick, burned red. The tornado had covered everything with a thick coat of muddy red earth.

Welsh continued west, narrating for his viewers what he could see of the buildings that had been heavily damaged or destroyed. The hospital was gone. The post office was damaged. A bank was completely wiped away. He flew into a heavy band of rain that made it almost impossible to see at moments, but before the camera could catch up to what he was seeing, Welsh, who had worked so hard to keep his cool even when the storm was threatening his own family, suddenly gasped. “Look at that school! Look at that school, guys! Oh my God!” Welsh cried as the helicopter’s camera, its lens blurry with rain, aimed toward the blasted-out remains of Plaza Towers Elementary. “I don’t know how to explain it, how to describe it. . . . This is terrible. This is war-zone terrible. This school is completely gone.”

Unlike others tracking the storm that day, Welsh did not use those words lightly. He knew what a war zone looked like. It had not been so long ago that he had been flying combat missions over Baghdad, but even that had not prepared him for what he was seeing now. He became emotional as he watched tiny figures, kids, emerging from the rubble of the school and running into the arms of people sprinting from all directions toward the flattened building. As he hovered above Plaza Towers, Welsh glanced out his left window, where, a few blocks away, he saw Briarwood Elementary, which had also been decimated by the storm. Guiding his aircraft closer to show viewers another horrific scene of destruction, Welsh could not hide the anguish in his voice. “As a parent,” Welsh said, his voice choking, “this is kind of hard to report on.”

Gardner, his counterpart at KWTV, was also struggling to contain his emotions. He was no stranger to disasters. In California he had covered wildfires and mud slides and the terrible aftermath of earthquakes. He had flown over the damage from the May 3 tornado and dozens of other storms since, but he had never seen anything as heart-wrenching as this. As he circled over Plaza Towers, Gardner could barely speak. “This is, uh . . . This ain’t good, that’s for sure,” he said, his voice choked up. As he focused on a group of people frantically digging at the remains of the school, he tried to continue but couldn’t. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice thick and shaky. “It gets a little hard to talk here.”

 • • • 

As the helicopters hovered in the sky above, Robert Romines was inside the collapsed building at Briarwood, where he’d been helping to pull kids and teachers out. He had never seen destruction like this. The building looked as though a bomb had blown it apart, and as he climbed over collapsed walls, he could see heavy steel beams that had been designed to hold up the roof bent and snapped like tiny twigs. Around every corner he worried about what he would find. How could anyone survive something like this? But again and again he and the rescue workers found tiny miracles—kids wedged tight into corners that somehow had been spared. The scene was so chaotic that they could only occasionally hear shouts for help. Outside the sky had grown dark again, making it difficult to see in the ruins. They didn’t have flashlights, only the faint light of their cell phones, which they shined inside the collapsed classrooms. It was so dark in parts of the destroyed school that the only way Romines detected pockets of trapped kids was when they smiled at him. They were covered in mud from head to toe like soldiers in war, but what little light there was reflected off their tiny white teeth. He had never been happier to see anybody in his life.

After a while Romines made his way back to the parking lot, where Shelly McMillin came to tell him that it appeared that everyone in the school had been accounted for. Though rescue workers were doing another scan of the school, just to be safe, it appeared that, aside from a few serious injuries, everyone had made it out alive. Romines couldn’t believe it. He turned back and stared at the school in shock. The building was so badly decimated that he wondered how anyone could have made it out alive. It was nothing short of miraculous.

But his sense of relief was only momentary. He had still not heard from his wife, and word suddenly came that the school administration building had taken a direct hit. With everyone at Briarwood accounted for, he and Jeff Horn ran to their truck and headed back east to check on their colleagues and on Highland East Junior High, near the administration building, which had also been hit. Cell service was still spotty, but they knew from another staffer and from reports on the radio that the tornado had also struck Plaza Towers. After seeing what had happened at Briarwood, how everyone had walked away from that leveled building, Romines allowed himself to believe that everybody had made it out at Plaza Towers too. He did not dare think otherwise.