The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (26 page)

Turning around, Garcia cried with joy, “Oh, Bowsy! Bless your little heart,” as she lifted up pieces of steel rebar with the producer’s help to free the little dog. His coat was dusty and covered in tiny pieces of rock, but Bowser scrambled out unscathed and walked to his owner, who was overcome. “Well, I thought God just answered one prayer to let me be okay,” Garcia tearfully told the CBS crew as she rubbed her little companion. “But he answered both of them because this was my second prayer.”

 • • • 

By midmorning the state medical examiner’s office had determined that the death toll from the tornado had been dramatically overestimated amid the mass confusion in the hours after the storm. Some of the victims had been counted twice—in part because of miscommunication over where the bodies had been taken. While almost all had been transported to the medical examiner’s office in Oklahoma City, some of the rescue squads working the scene in Moore thought they had been taken directly to local funeral homes. At Plaza Towers officials had believed until early that morning that twenty kids were dead—even though they had recovered only seven bodies.

The toll was reduced to twenty-four people—ten of whom were children. The youngest victims were Case Futrell, the three-month-old newborn who died in his mother’s arms at the 7-Eleven, and seven-month-old Sydnee Vargyas, who had been sucked from her mother’s grasp. The body of her four-year-old sister, Karrina, was found by a neighbor buried in the rubble of his home seven houses away. And then there were the seven third graders at Plaza Towers: Antonia Candelaria, Kyle Davis, Ja’Nae Hornsby, Sydney Angle, Emily Conatzer, Christopher Legg, and Nicolas McCabe.

While Simpson and other school officials believed that the families had been gathered back at the First Baptist Church to receive the terrible news, continued miscommunication among the medical examiner’s office, the local chaplain, and other officials in Moore caused the news to be broken to some parents in callous ways. Some were called back to the church, but some parents later said they’d learned their children’s fate through a phone call from the state medical examiner’s office. Your child’s body has been processed, an official told one mother. Where should we send the body?

 • • • 

Amy Simpson had just left the staff meeting at Moore High School and was trying to get back to her home south of Nineteenth Street on the west side of town when a colleague called to let her know that the parents of kids who had died at Plaza Towers were about to be notified. After that the names of all the victims would be made public at a press conference that afternoon. The world would finally know what she had known for hours but couldn’t say: The worst carnage had happened at her school.

Simpson hung up the phone and continued driving. She longed to go to the parents but understood why she had been instructed not to. Nothing she could say or do would bring their children back. Now all she wanted to do was go home, but even that seemed to be impossible. The entire city of Moore was crippled by gridlock, as cars backed up trying to get into the storm-ravaged neighborhoods. Everywhere she turned there was a roadblock—to the east, to the south, and to the west. The roads that were open were an endless sea of vehicles that seemed to be going nowhere. A 2-mile drive that usually took ten or fifteen minutes at most was now coming close to an hour. She called Lindy and asked him if he had any idea how she could get back to their neighborhood, and as she spoke to him, she could feel all the emotions that she’d so far been able to keep in check start to bubble forth. When she hung up the phone, Simpson finally began to cry. She put her head down on her steering wheel and gave in to a steady stream of hot tears that had been building up since that terrible tornado had savagely taken aim at her school the day before, ruining so many lives. Why had it happened? Why did those kids have to die? All she could do was sit there in traffic and cry.

 • • • 

At the hospital in Oklahoma City, Jennifer Doan kept asking her fiancé, Nyle Rogers, to tell her what had happened to her students. You need to rest, he told her. Don’t worry. Her doctors also refused to say anything. Deep down Doan knew the news was bad, but she wanted to hear it. She wanted to know the names. She wanted to know what had happened to the rest of the school. And even though her fractured sternum and spine had immobilized her, she kept asking again and again until her voice was a labored whisper. What happened to my kids?

In the hallway a hospital psychologist advised against telling her. She wasn’t ready. She was too fragile. But Doan wouldn’t let up. Even though she could barely speak at times because of the pain, she asked everybody who came to visit her, including Amy Simpson—who made her way to the hospital on Tuesday afternoon and was forced to keep another terrible secret.

The next day Simpson came to the hospital again with a list of the seven kids who had died, which she gave to Doan’s fiancé and to the doctors. Except for Christopher Legg, a boy from another third-grade glass at Plaza Towers, they were all Doan’s students.

Armed with the list, Simpson, Rogers, and the hospital psychologist went into Doan’s hospital room, and the teacher quickly realized from the looks on their faces that she was finally going to get the answer she had been looking for. But even then Doan was not prepared. As the psychologist began to read off the list of names, Doan, immobilized in a back brace that barely allowed her to move, began to wail and cry, shrieks of anguish that were heard all over the hospital. Simpson told Doan that the kids closest to her, the ones she had been able to wrap her arms around—Porter Trammell and Xavier Delgado—had both survived, but her sobs only grew louder with the reading of every name.

“They are all mine!” she cried again and again. “They are all mine!”

T
hree days after the tornado, under a stormy Oklahoma sky, its first victim was buried. The funeral of nine-year-old Antonia Candelaria was held at a small funeral home in south Oklahoma City, about 7 miles north of Plaza Towers. Tonie, as she was known, was a vibrant spark plug of a girl—a “ladybug,” her mother called her—with limitless energy. She was always singing and dancing. She loved country music, and somehow she knew every word to every single song on the radio, whether it was Toby Keith or Carrie Underwood. Her parents wondered if she might be a performer someday. The third grader had signed up to sing in Plaza Towers’ annual talent show, scheduled for the last day of the school. She had still been deciding on a song. And then the tornado came.

Her family lived a few blocks from Plaza Towers, and after climbing out of their own destroyed home, her father had sprinted down the road toward the school to find Tonie and her ten-year-old sister, Trinity, who was in fourth grade. He helped pull out child after child from the rubble, eventually finding Trinity, who had ridden out the storm in a bathroom. But Tonie never emerged. She had died on her mother’s birthday.

When mourners gathered that Thursday, the heavens opened, unleashing a soaking waterfall of rain that drenched almost everyone as they made their way into the service, where sad country songs played as people took their seats. The program was festooned with tiny ladybugs, and around the room there were photos of Tonie with her round, sweet face and heart-melting smile. Neighbors recalled seeing the girl running and playing up and down the block—her face and arms often covered in a rainbow of chalk dust from the pictures of friends and family and sunny landscapes she’d been drawing on her driveway.

Her only solace, her mother said, was that her daughter had died clutching the hand of her lifelong best friend, Emily Conatzer, nine, who had grown up across the street from their house. As the service began, one by one relatives stood and spoke about the young girl who had been taken too soon while outside a wild storm began to rage. Lightning flashed through the windows and cracks of thunder rumbled the building—cruel reminders of that terrible Monday for the dozens of students and teachers from Plaza Towers still so jittery from their own brush with death. They jumped with every boom of thunder.

Among them was Amy Simpson, who was still trying so hard to keep it together. It was always the children who were the most intuitive. The kids from Plaza came up to hug her waist and looked up at her with concern. “Are you okay, Mrs. Simpson?” they asked in their tiny voices.

“I’m okay,” she said, struggling to keep her composure. Her heart ached, and she wanted to cry, but no tears would capture the immensity of the pain she felt. Tonie’s service was just the first of seven funerals scheduled for the coming days—some back to back at local churches. Simpson’s anguish was compounded by the pain and fear she saw on the faces of the students and teachers who had escaped with their lives. How would they get through this?

 • • • 

As Moore buried the dead and began the arduous task of cleaning up and trying to rebuild, storms continued to roll through central Oklahoma. Gary England was on air at KWTV for every one of them, as he always was, doing his part to be the calm, guiding voice for a region still on edge. But privately England was more tortured than he’d ever been. Every tornado was horrible, every death was horrible, but this was his worst nightmare: A school had been hit and kids had died. In the days after the storm he’d looked at their pictures and watched and read stories about their young lives so full of promise and possibility, and all he could do was wonder if there was something more he could have done.

England thought back to the May 3 storm, which had hit two schools in Moore, heavily damaging Westmoore High School and completely destroying Kelley Elementary. Thankfully, no kids had been killed that day because the tornado had hit after school, but he’d told a few people it was a clear sign that the old advice to shelter in hallways would not be enough if a tornado was to hit during the day—not with the more destructive storms. But now England anguished over whether he should have been more blunt and outspoken about his concerns over the safety of schools. Should he have used his bully pulpit more forcefully? Like his competitors, he’d gone on air hours early that Monday, suggesting the worst storms could hit before school let out and urging parents to plan ahead. A teacher from Briarwood Elementary had contacted him—thanking him because most of her class had left before the tornado hit. She credited this to his early warnings. But all England could do was think about those kids at Plaza Towers and the others who had died. Could he have done more to save them? Had he failed somehow? It was those same questions that had always haunted him, but now they were even more pronounced. Why were so many people dying?

England counted down the days of May, praying that the tornado that hit Moore would mark the end of a terrible storm season in Oklahoma. But on May 31 the unthinkable happened. West of Oklahoma City, a storm developed that was even bigger than the Moore tornado. As it neared El Reno, a tornado at least 2.6 miles wide dropped to the ground—the widest twister ever recorded. England had never seen a storm like this, and as it lurched unpredictably over the wide-open farmland, he saw things he’d never seen on radar before as it abruptly changed direction and developed tornadoes within the tornado. It was hell on earth, and he began to fear for the lives not only of his viewers but also of his team of storm chasers, who appeared to be getting way too close to the monster funnel and resolutely ignored his calls to pull back.

In the days after the tornado hit Moore England had yelled at his team—including Val Castor, KWTV’s veteran storm chaser, who also happened to be one of his closest friends. The frustration had been building up for months. He angrily warned them they were getting too close to the storms, taking too many risks, and getting too amped up on air. They were scaring people by yelling and screaming, he complained, and something bad was bound to happen if they became too panicked. He ordered them to calm down and to be safer, reminding them that they weren’t invincible and that no footage was worth dying over.

But on that Friday, as another monster twister dropped down just west of Oklahoma City, some members of his team, seduced by the thrill of the chase, ignored his orders and again seemed to be taking too many risks. It was terrifying to England, who had never seen a storm like this before. “This storm will kill you,” he declared to viewers, though he hoped his own staff was listening.

At one point Castor and David Payne, England’s heir apparent at KWTV, who was out chasing that day, began yelling over each other as the storm began to intensify around them, and England lost his cool. “You guys listen to me,” he told them sternly. “You are not in a good position. This thing is very close to you. You do not need to get that close. You’re in the circulation!”

“It’s not moving, though,” Castor interrupted.

“Well, let me tell you,” England shot back, sounding like an irritated father scolding a misbehaving son. “You may think it’s not moving, but it is moving. We can see it on radar. . . . Goodness gracious. It’s just absolutely unbelievable.”

By then all the stations in Oklahoma City were in wall-to-wall live coverage. On KFOR Mike Morgan was becoming increasingly panicked. As the tornado grew larger and larger, he repeatedly advised viewers in the path of the storm who couldn’t get below ground to drive away from the storm. “Go south,” he said. What Morgan didn’t know was that roads were already clogged with traffic, cars full of people still on edge after the Moore tornado. Soon the roads all over the region were gridlocked by people trying to outrun the latest tornado, which, unlike most twisters, abruptly changed direction several times—finally heading southeast toward Oklahoma City and Moore. Along the way eight people were killed when their vehicles were swept up into the storm—including a mother and child whose car was sucked off Interstate 40. Morgan was vilified—even though England and others had often advised viewers to drive out of the path of the tornadoes if they had enough warning time to get away. While he later said he cried over what had happened, he didn’t apologize for his advice, telling viewers in a Facebook message that he would never stop giving viewers the information they deserved to be safe from potentially deadly storms.

Morgan wasn’t the only one traumatized by the El Reno tornado. That night, after the storm narrowly missed hitting Moore again, England stood in the weather center at KWTV stunned by everything that had happened. Two of the strongest tornadoes on record had hit his viewing area within a span of less than two weeks. Part of him was angry—mad at his storm chasers, who had almost lost their lives by getting too close. (He didn’t yet know about the deaths of Tim Samaras and his storm-chasing team, who had been killed in the storm.) He was upset about the tone of the coverage—not only by his team but also by other stations, which he blamed for hyping the storms and scaring people into a panic.

That night Jim Gardner, the station’s helicopter pilot, had panned over the landscape ahead of the tornado, and all England could see was the glow of headlights of cars trying to go south. He wanted to yell in frustration. Why would people do that after everything that happened? Cars were the most dangerous place to be in storms. What was wrong with these people? He just couldn’t believe it. By then word had come in that some had died in their cars on the highway. England shook his head, pained at a tragedy that he believed could have been prevented.

Around him his team of young meteorologists continued to work, monitoring the weakened storms as they moved east—just in case they intensified again. He recalled the hours earlier in the day when his staff, many fresh out of college, had seemed almost giddy at the bad weather that was coming. He didn’t blame them. He had been like that once too, caught up in the excitement of the weather and what it would do. That was the odd thing about storms. No one wanted them to do terrible damage, but at the same time, as a meteorologist you did want the weather to be interesting. But he felt many of his protégés still didn’t understand how truly terrible the storms could be. They didn’t yet feel the intense pressure, the burden of trying to keep viewers safe—at least not in the painful, obsessive way that he did. They did not know what it was like to be the man everybody counted on to save them or what it felt like when people died. The anguish of the storms, the weight of deaths didn’t yet keep them up at night, but it would. Going up against Mother Nature was still a thrill for them—the young, foolish ones, he called them—but lately he had come to feel it was no longer fun.

With the studio still abuzz England quietly walked back to his office and picked up the phone and called his wife, Mary. He had once thought they might have to wheel him out of the station into his grave because he loved his job so much. But something had changed that night. It was not yet 8:30
P.M.
, and though he’d usually stick around for the 10:00
P.M.
newscast and beyond that to watch the tapes and analyze their coverage, he had no interest in doing so that night. “Come get me,” he told his wife in a quiet, exhausted voice. “It’s over.” He said good-bye to his staff but said nothing else. The next day he called the station’s owner, David Griffin, and gave notice. England retired six weeks later into an off-air job in weather development with KWTV and never looked back. The era of Gary England as the reigning weather god of Oklahoma television was over. He would never have to confront a tornado again—at least not in front of a camera.

 • • • 

When the storm that produced the El Reno tornado finally died out on the evening of May 31, it did, as many had hoped, mark the end of Oklahoma’s spring tornado season. But something strange happened. While storms still rumbled through occasionally, May 31 marked the last time in 2013 that a tornado warning was issued anywhere in the state. The next tornado warning didn’t come until April 2014, nearly a year later. It was a new record. Not since 1986 had there been such a long lapse of time between tornado warnings in Oklahoma. While most Oklahomans were grateful, the long dry spell puzzled Rick Smith and the other meteorologists at the National Weather Service, where, in an unusual move, grief counselors had been brought in to talk to staff overwhelmed by the stress of that deadly tornado outbreak over the last two weeks of May. They were professionals who had long ago mastered the ability to keep their cool and separate their emotions from their job of keeping people in Oklahoma safe, but that series of storms had been too much.

It had been an unusually active year for tornadoes in Oklahoma in 2013. There were 79 tornadoes in the first six months of the year—more than in any other state in the country except for Texas, which reported 81 for the entire year. But nationally it had been a slow period for tornadoes. Most years more than 1,000 tornadoes are reported in America. But in 2013 there were just 898—one of the lowest years on record.

The statistic mystified Smith and scientists like Howard Bluestein, who noted that there seemed to be a trend in tornadoes. Every season with a huge outbreak of deadly weather seemed to be followed by, for lack of a better word, a drought. Smith and Bluestein had no idea why the weather behaved like this—why some storm years were more active than others. Maybe it was climate change or maybe it was just bad luck. It was another reminder of the mystery of the tornado. “The last frontier of atmospheric science,” Bluestein called it. That season took a toll even on Bluestein, who was troubled by the deaths in Oklahoma. He had known Tim Samaras and the other chasers killed by the El Reno storm. Like him, they had dedicated their lives to trying to unlock the mystery of tornadoes. He tried to focus on how much Samaras had contributed to the science of tornadoes. He was a hero within the meteorology community. That he had been killed by the thing he had invested decades in trying to understand seemed especially cruel, and it was yet another reminder to Bluestein of how dangerous and ruthless tornadoes could be.