The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (27 page)

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In Moore city workers began clearing debris from the blasted-out neighborhoods within five days of the May 20 storm. They were helped by thousands of volunteers from all over the country who descended on the city to help residents rebuild as quickly as possible—many church members who had been moved by the city’s unlucky streak and wanted to help. By late June, a month after the storm, the land around Plaza Towers Elementary resembled a muddy, rocky moonscape, wiped clean of the remains of the demolished school and homes that had once stood there. People from outside Oklahoma were stunned at how quickly things were moving—especially compared with places like the Jersey Shore, where the ruins of many homes destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 were still standing largely untouched many months after the storm.

Steve Eddy, Moore’s city manager, gently reminded people that his city had been through this before—five times now. Of all the lessons he’d learned—and by now there had been many—he believed strongly that the quickest way for the city to find its way back to normalcy was to clear the slate and rebuild anew. While many looked at the barren landscape with anguish, pained by everything that had been lost in the terrible storm, he tried to focus only on the positive. He pushed people to look forward, to focus on rebuilding the city even stronger.

That summer the city council approved some of the toughest building codes in the country, establishing guidelines that required houses to be rebuilt with reinforced walls and windows that could withstand winds of at least 135 miles per hour. That would not have been enough to protect homes in the path of the May 20 tornado, which packed winds of at least 200 miles per hour, but it was the best they could do aside from building homes made entirely of concrete, with no windows and heavy steel doors. In the weeks after the tornado some had proposed building homes exactly like that in some of the devastated neighborhoods, but Eddy and other Moore officials quickly rejected the idea. Nobody wanted to live in a town where the houses looked like crypts.

Always the professional, Eddy focused less on why and more on what to do now. But his mind was occasionally consumed by the question of why Moore had been struck again, and when the city resumed its weekly testing of tornado sirens every Saturday at noon, even he found his heart racing a bit, the ominous whine a reminder of that horrible Monday.

Slowly his own life got back to normal. He had barely seen his wife in the month after the storm. He was busy at City Hall, and she worked at the Red Cross, which was overseeing disaster efforts. At church a few Sundays after the storm, their pastor had made them both stand up before the congregation to finally publicly congratulate them on their marriage, which had happened in Hawaii three weeks before the tornado. “Their honeymoon,” the minister said, without a trace of irony, “was a disaster.”

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Within days of the tornado, Moore Public Schools administrators announced plans to rebuild Briarwood and Plaza Towers. This time, however, each would be rebuilt to include a massive safe room able to shelter as many as 1,400 people. With reinforced concrete walls ten inches thick, the new shelter was said to be able to withstand the winds of an EF5 tornado like the one that had hit on May 20. Moving forward, every new school in Moore would include such a shelter, officials said—thanks in part to a grant from FEMA. But existing schools in Moore and in much of Oklahoma would still be unprotected, in spite of a public outcry that the state should add shelters to protect kids in case another tornado like May 20 happened again.

While polls found incredible public support for shelters, proposals that would have allowed the state to issue bonds or raise sales taxes to pay for them were stymied in the state legislature by conservative lawmakers, including Governor Mary Fallin, who felt it should be up to individual cities to determine if they wanted to invest taxpayer money in protecting schools from tornadoes. Not every city, she said, was as prone to tornadoes as Moore seemed to be.

The political opposition mystified officials in Moore. School administrators began to try to figure out how to pay for more shelters out of an already tight budget, and in the meantime Mayor Glenn Lewis and other city officials began urging residents to install their own shelters at home. By the summer there was a waiting list of upward of six months in Oklahoma City and Moore to install a tornado shelter. Companies couldn’t keep up with demand. Local television and radio stations, which used to give away cars during contests, soon began giving away storm shelters instead.

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Even as Moore slowly began to rebuild, it was the wounds beneath the surface that took far longer to heal. Those who had survived the tornado—especially the kids and teachers at Briarwood and Plaza Towers—struggled to get back to their normal routines, but they were haunted by what had happened. Scores of grief counselors descended on the city—closely monitoring the children who had been inside the schools for any signs of trauma. In some ways it was the educators who struggled the most—adults who truly understood in a way the kids couldn’t the horror of what had happened that day and what had been lost. They were tortured by memories of the storm, which were stirred up by any little thing—a shift in the wind, the testing of the tornado siren on Saturdays. Even the smell of coming rain—which used to be so soothing—now triggered terrible memories.

Many of the teachers went for weeks without sleep, unable to close their eyes without being transported back to that day. They vividly remembered how the tornado had felt and sounded as it began to rip apart the building around them. They remembered the screams of their students and emerging into the Armageddon of the neighborhood afterward. Many of the teachers participated in group counseling sessions—listening as their colleagues spoke of their anxiety attacks and described how haunted they were by questions that would never be answered. Why had this happened to them, to their school? Moore was a city of faith where many trusted and believed in the Lord’s will, but still they wondered, why had God allowed such a terrible thing to happen to innocent children?

Jennifer Doan had been released from the hospital a few days after the storm, and for most of the summer she wore a brace as her fractured spine healed. She needed to have surgery for her injured hand, which had been pierced by steel rebar, severing many nerves. But she delayed it because of her pregnancy and other injuries. Though she was in intense pain, she refused to take medication, fearful that it could hurt her baby. But in many ways she felt numb without the drugs, as if she were walking in some haze of a terrible nightmare.

Her mind kept going back to that day in the back hallway. She felt guilty for being alive when seven of the kids who had gathered around her were not. She tried to feel normal, to feel excited about the baby. It was a boy, she’d learned. But on many days she found it hard to muster enthusiasm for life, even though she knew she had so much to live for—her two young daughters; her fiancé, who had stayed at her side through every terrible moment; and her soon-to-be-born baby son. But she struggled to deal with the memories of the storm and the guilt she felt at not having protected her students. Amy Simpson and others told her she had done everything she could. “God makes our choices for us long before,” Simpson had told her. “You had no control over what happened.” Doan tried to accept it, but her mind would flash back to that day, buried under the rubble, where she had listened to the sound of the children’s cries slowly fading into total silence, and she couldn’t help but blame herself.

A few days after she was released from the hospital, Doan had gone back to Moore for a memorial service for the children who had died, but after that she had stayed away, worried about what being in Moore might stir up. While the other teachers had leaned on one another, Doan had kept to herself, grieving on her own. Over the summer she finally visited the site where Plaza Towers had been. The remains of the school were long gone, and it was just flat earth being prepped for the construction of a new school that would open for the 2014 school year. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence covered with teddy bears and other memorials left behind by visitors from all over the world who had come to pay their respects. Just beyond the fence were seven crosses, each bearing the name of a child who had died. Doan stood there and cried.

On the way back to Edmond, where she lived, Doan pulled over at a tag agency in Moore. She needed to renew her driver’s license, and on her way into the building a woman stopped her. She recognized Doan from the news, and she gently pulled the still-recovering teacher into a hug. “You’re such a hero,” the woman told her. “What you did for those kids . . . You are a hero.” Doan tried to be polite, but she found herself unable to speak. She knew the woman meant well, but the encounter only reminded her of how much she felt like a failure.

Her job was not only to educate her students but also to keep them safe. That had been her assignment that Monday, what the parents who had dropped their children off at school had trusted her to do. She had gone over and over it with her counselor. How could she be a hero, she wondered, if kids she was supposed to be protecting had died? She couldn’t stop blaming herself.

A few months later Doan and Nyle Rogers married, and that December she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. She named him Jack Nicolas—his middle name after Nicolas McCabe, the student who had been just out of her grasp in the back hallway at Plaza Towers and had died.

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In the months after the tornado Amy Simpson had thrown herself into trying to help her students and teachers recover after the storm, often putting their needs above her own. With Plaza Towers destroyed and a new facility more than a year away, Simpson and her students were moved temporarily into the older wing of a junior high school across town while Briarwood held classes at a local church.

For Simpson the list of things she had to do was overwhelming, from ordering new textbooks to making sure they’d have enough desks. The school district had issued a waiver to families displaced by the storm, and she worked to ensure that every kid who wanted to be back at Plaza Towers that fall would be. While about 80 percent of the students had decided to return, some families—including a few who had lost children on May 20—had opted to move on, to turn the page and begin anew someplace else. It made Simpson sad, but she understood. Some of her teachers had decided to transfer to other schools too—hoping to make a fresh start.

The summer she had looked forward to was consumed by the aftermath of the tornado. Even when her family went on vacation to Texas for a weekend, her cell phone rang at all hours of the day with calls from teachers and parents considering how to approach the new school year with kids who were still assimilating the trauma of what had happened. Simpson was a big believer in routine and normalcy as a way of healing—and going back to class, she hoped, would be a big help. But she agonized over how to address the tragedy that had hit their school. She wanted kids to talk about their feelings about the tornado and losing their classmates, but how should she handle the emotions that would ensue? The city had assigned extra counselors to keep an eye on the kids. They were planning special classes, including art therapy to help the children deal with their fears about the weather and memories of May 20. But what would happen when the storms came again?

As Simpson focused on her kids and teachers and making sure everything was going as smoothly as it could for the upcoming school year, she was also confronting her own emotional roller coaster. While she had kept herself from breaking down in those early hours after the storm, in the months afterward it seemed as though the tears would never stop. She was consumed by guilt. Had she done everything she could to protect the kids who had died? Had she handled everything as well as she could have in the hours after the storm? She’d heard from a teacher that some of her colleagues were mad at her for her demeanor after the tornado had hit, for how calm she’d been. All she’d tried to do was be strong, but some of her staff had apparently taken it the wrong way, believing she had been too stern with them or cold.

Simpson used to love storms. Now she hated them. And even though she’d lived in Moore her entire life and knew the city tested the storm sirens on Saturdays, she now jumped every time she heard them go off. Sometimes, for no reason at all, she just started to cry. Her two kids soon grew impatient with it all. “The tornado again?” her son Roarke would say in an exasperated voice. It was just another layer to the guilt Simpson felt about everything, especially her own children. She worried she was being a bad mother, because she was so torn up inside. She felt guilty for how the tornado had consumed their lives and ruined their summer. Most of all she felt terrible for getting irritated with her son and daughter when they acted up. They were kids being kids, and she was a mom being a mom. There was nothing abnormal about it. But afterward she was consumed with guilt, thinking of the parents who no longer had their kids. She found the guilt suffocating at times, but still she pushed on. She had no right to complain when others were suffering so much more.

On some days Simpson went alone to visit the graves of the children who had died. She had been so angry with Lindy for keeping her from climbing into the pit of the demolished back building in the hours after the tornado to help identify the bodies of the kids who’d been killed. She’d wanted to help the parents who were in misery, but now she was grateful that he’d held her back. She could imagine them as she’d last seen them—happy and joyful and bouncing around without a care in the world. She had always loved her husband, but after the tornado their relationship had grown even stronger. Before the storm, at Christmas, she’d often caught him staring off into the distance, lost in thought as their kids tore into presents. After the tornado she talked to him about the guilt she sometimes felt looking at their kids, and he confessed that in those lost moments he’d been thinking about his own experiences as a firefighter, when he’d tried to save a child but it had been too late. He’d felt guilty for the happiness he felt when others had lost so much—the same feeling his wife now felt.