The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (4 page)

In response, he smiled and somewhat bashfully accepted the praise. When asked about it, he agreed that things could have been far worse, but inside he was torn apart in a way that he had never been by the hundreds of storms he had seen in his career. Even as the state moved on, rebuilding as it always did, he obsessed over the people who had been killed that day. Why had they died? Did they not know the storm was coming? Had they not taken cover? What could he have done to reach them more effectively?

“Tornadoes can be very majestic when they are out in the fields somewhere, when no one is around,” he often told people. “But my god, when you put them in a populated area, it is terrifying.” As Oklahoma City expanded and cities like Moore built out into the rural farmland tornadoes were known to frequent, the potential scale and scope of the devastation was growing.

 • • • 

Back in 1999, a few weeks after the May 3 storm, England took an afternoon off work and pulled the coroner’s reports on the people who had been killed that day. It was the beginning of a dark tradition he would secretly pursue over the next decade after every deadly tornado as he embarked on a desperate search to understand how people had died and maybe learn how he could save more lives the next time disaster struck.

England was horrified by the injuries he read about in the coroner’s reports. Some victims had tried to run from the tornado and been sucked up and spit out, their bodies literally pulverized by the storm. Others had been killed when they were hit in the head by flying debris. He quietly talked to doctors about the injuries of those who had survived—and was amazed and shocked by what he heard. He was told about people whose skin had almost been sandblasted off by the storm—leaving their bones and tendons exposed. One man’s eyeball had literally exploded when he was hit by debris, but he lived too. Another victim had been impaled in the throat by a two-by-four.

He didn’t tell anyone what he had done. He felt it was too morbid, too dark. But on air he began issuing unusual decrees for subsequent storms. In addition to his usual mantra urging people to “take your safety precautions” and “get below ground,” he started telling people to wear helmets and shatterproof goggles, along with heavy, long-sleeved clothing. He told them to dress as if they were going to war. He suspected some of his fellow meteorologists might think he had gone off the deep end. He was encouraging his viewers to do something that even the National Weather Service hadn’t endorsed. But he didn’t care. “Twenty percent of those killed on May 3 died of brain injuries,” he said. “I’m from Seiling, Oklahoma, and that to me says wear a helmet.”

Fourteen years later, in 2013, the National Weather Service began issuing similar directives about helmets and clothing—which made England feel somewhat vindicated. But by then he had grown more obsessive in other ways about his responsibility to his viewers. KWTV had given him a “lifetime” contract to stay on air until he felt like he wasn’t, as the station’s owner put it, “having fun” anymore. And more and more, the joy he had found in his job was vanishing, erased by the suffocating burden of protecting people from the erratic whims of Mother Nature. Since the 1999 tornado, England had felt intense pressure to get everything exactly right—his words, his mannerisms. Over the years, he had grown more and more worried that any innocent misstep—such as the mistakes that had plagued some of his weather rivals at the other local stations—could result in death. He had always reviewed the tapes of coverage after the storms, but he began to take it a step further.

During every major weather event, he not only had the station tape the live coverage on air. He asked that another camera roam throughout the studio to film him and his staff at work. Afterward, he went over the tapes again and again, watching and listening carefully to everything he or anyone else—his storm trackers, his colleagues in studio—had said. He was like a football coach looking for any weakness in his team as he tried to plan the perfect plays against an enemy that was largely unpredictable. He would review the tapes dozens of times—sometimes that very night, in part because he couldn’t sleep. It was a routine he’d long ago gotten used to—the sleepless nights in the springtime, the nightmares of what the season would have in store. Sitting at his computer on May 20, he was plagued by questions that had come to haunt him after every major storm: How many people had died, and what could he have done to save them?

When he had left the station after midnight, the extent of casualties had still been unknown. But he had been unnerved by the footage of what he’d seen of the storm to the southeast of Oklahoma City—cars demolished and swept off the road and homes wiped clear of their foundations. A grandmother had been rescued from a bathtub that had been lifted from her home and lodged in a tree. It was a miracle, and he hoped there would be others, but deep down he always assumed the worst. How many people had died? The question haunted him as he made his fifteen-minute commute home, where his wife was still awake and waiting for him as she did after almost every storm.

They’d met at Southwestern Oklahoma State University fifty-three years earlier. England had just left the navy, and though he was in school pursuing his dream of being a weatherman, he’d spent more time studying girls in his first semester than hitting the books. He was on a date with another girl when he saw her walking between two cars—a tiny strawberry-blonde cheerleader with the most beautiful blue eyes he’d ever seen. As she passed directly in front of him, he reached out, grabbed her arm, and pulled her into a kiss. It was love at first sight. His date punched him and stormed away, and England grinned at the stunned cheerleader. Her name was Mary, and even though she thought he was a bit of a rascal, they were inseparable after that. Soul mates, they said. A year later they were married. They had one daughter, Molly, who now lived in Southern California with her husband and two daughters—far away from the wild weather of Oklahoma.

As he kissed Mary good night, his mind was elsewhere. Checking his computer one last time, he saw that there was still no word on fatalities. Climbing into bed he was tired—but it was the kind of tired where you can’t sleep. How many people had died? The question wouldn’t go away.

Now, wide awake and back at his computer, he still had no answers. As he began poring over weather data for the day, he could see that the storms were likely to be as bad as or worse than Sunday’s. The projection maps suggested the worst weather would be to the south of Oklahoma City—which would be a relief, if true, since that was mostly open farmland. But looking at the current radar, England noticed that there was a line of moisture positioned right over the city—a hint that trouble might be brewing closer to home.

In his gut he knew there was only one way to tell how bad it would be that day. He stood up and walked to his front door. It was almost 5:00
A.M.
, and the dark sky was just starting to lighten, with flecks of gold to the east, where the sun would soon rise. As he opened the door, he was hit by a blast of air so salty and warm and moist it felt as though the Gulf of Mexico, hundreds of miles to the south, were at his doorstep. He was instantly reminded of the last time he had felt air so unstable this early in the morning: It was on May 3, 1999.

His heart pounding, he quickly went back to his computer and sent out an e-mail to the entire KWTV staff, putting the station on “priority one”—the highest alert level possible. It was all hands on deck. He warned that it was likely there would be tornadoes that day directly to the west of Oklahoma City, heading right toward the metro area.

Within minutes, it was clear he wasn’t the only one who’d had a sleepless night. Many of his staff, including his roster of storm chasers, replied to his e-mail almost as soon as he’d sent it, asking what their role should be in the coverage that day. But as England began to respond to them and organize their war plan, at the back of his mind that haunting question presented itself again and again: How many people would die that day? And what could he do to save them?

T
he alarm went off too early, as it always did. Amy Simpson had never been a morning person. Not when she was a kid and certainly not now, just weeks after her forty-second birthday. All she wanted to do was roll over and go back to sleep, cuddled next to the love of her life, her husband, Lindy, but responsibility called. Her two children, Scarlet, seven, and Roarke, twelve, needed to be woken up and fed and shuttled off to school. And she had to be at work early too, a couple of miles away at Plaza Towers Elementary in Moore, where she was wrapping up her third year as head principal.

Resisting the urge to sleep a few minutes more, Simpson forced herself out of bed, still half asleep but her mind alert enough to begin going through her mental to-do list. She already knew it would be a busy day, the very last Monday of the school year. And as she quickly glanced at her phone, she saw confirmation of what the local news had been predicting for almost a week: Monday would be a day of bad weather. A 100 percent probability of severe storms, the forecast said. Hail and high winds and a strong chance of tornadoes in the afternoon, some likely in the Oklahoma City metro area.

It sounded like a typical May afternoon in Oklahoma, Simpson thought as she began to get ready for work. She wasn’t being indifferent. It was just the way it was, the way it had always been. Born and raised in Moore, Simpson simply couldn’t recall a single May in her entire life that hadn’t been interrupted by the rumble of thunderstorms and the threat of twisters. For her and many others in central Oklahoma, Mother Nature’s springtime wrath was as routine as the leaves changing colors in the fall. And while the weather could be scary—and on many days in the late spring, it was—storms were something that she’d been raised to live with, like an annoying relative you couldn’t disown. Oklahoma didn’t cancel school for severe thunderstorms. If it did, there would simply be no classes for much of the spring.

For as long as Amy Simpson could remember, one of the first things she had done when she went outside was look up at the sky to see what it was doing. She couldn’t remember how the habit had started; it seemed to be instinctual, something everybody did. She had long ago discerned the differences between “the good clouds and the bad clouds,” as she put it, something she was teaching her own children the way her parents had taught her. It was all part of what people here called being “weather aware.” The storms could blow up in an instant, and kids were taught from the moment they could grasp a clear thought to pay attention to the sky and to follow the weather reports, even when there wasn’t a cloud to be seen. But as cautious as she was on storm days, Simpson also knew that life had to go on, no matter what the forecast was. And just as she’d gotten used to the crash of thunder and flash of lightning, her own kids were adapting to it too. Such was life on the plains of stormy Oklahoma.

Outside, the streets of Moore were quiet and still except for the occasional whine of the 18-wheelers going up and down Interstate 35, which cut a straight line, north to south, through the center of town. The sun was still a few minutes away from rising, but it was light enough to see a hazy blue peeking through dense pockets of scattered clouds. One needed only to feel the air to know a storm was coming. A thick blanket of humidity hung over the city like an invisible fog—so steamy car windows glistened with drops of moisture that shimmered like tiny rhinestones as they were illuminated by the glow of passing headlights. It smelled as if the rain might explode from the heavens at any second—a sweet, refreshing scent that was almost intoxicating to people who had grown up around the warm rainstorms of the Oklahoma spring. But while there were a few showers in the surrounding areas, Moore was still in the clear, at least on the radar—though the heavy, moist air suggested it wouldn’t be for long.

All over town people were waking up and seeing the same thing. It had been like this for almost a week: stormy days and stormy nights, threatening skies, with warnings of more bad weather to come. Sometimes at this time of year it seemed the weather was just on one endless, stormy loop. Most people in Oklahoma had learned to love the spring storms—finding a strange beauty in the clouds and the awesome majesty of the storms as they moved across the landscape. But the residents of Moore appreciated in ways few others did how truly brutal Mother Nature could be.

Four times since 1998 Moore had been hit by tornadoes—destructive funnels that dropped from the sky and wiped out large swaths of the city as they moved from west to east. None was more devastating than the one that hit on May 3, 1999, a storm that flattened neighborhoods on the west side of town like an atomic bomb as it cut a 38-mile path across central Oklahoma. Fourteen years later, it was still the storm that people who had lived through it talked about, the one every storm since had been compared with.

At the time, like her neighbors, Simpson thought that May 3 was “the storm of the century,” as people put it, that incredible once-in-a-lifetime tornado that people would tell their grandkids about. She’d been in Oklahoma City when the storm hit, at a teacher’s banquet, and she hadn’t even known about it until she’d tried to get back to Moore. Unlike many others, her family had been spared, but she still remembered the fear and worry she’d felt when she couldn’t immediately reach them. She never wanted to go through an experience like that again.

But four years later, on an early Thursday evening in May 2003, Moore was hit again, in almost exactly the same spot, by a tornado with winds nearing 200 miles per hour that struck a neighborhood that had just been rebuilt. Until then, many people around Moore had clung to that old adage that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same spot. But not only was that not true—lightning actually could strike twice and often did in Oklahoma, where homes regularly burned to the ground during the electrical storms that accompanied the rains—it almost certainly didn’t apply to tornadoes. They threatened Moore again and again, the thunderheads furiously rotating in the sky above but never quite touching the earth. By the time another large funnel hit the ground—on May 10, 2010—people both in and outside Moore had started to question what it was about the city that made it so unlucky with the weather. Why did the worst storms Oklahoma had ever seen always seem to hit Moore?

There was no sign or memorial marking where the May 3 tornado had hit—the leveled neighborhoods had long ago been rebuilt, and the young trees planted to replace the ones killed by the storm were now leafy and fully grown. On the streets where people had died or been critically injured sheltering from a storm that reduced their homes to toothpicks and sucked away everything they owned, things were back to normal. The houses weren’t old, but they no longer looked brand-new. The paint had faded ever so slightly, and the driveways no longer had that look of freshly poured concrete. The yards out front had spots of crabgrass blending in with the replanted sod. The neighborhoods looked comfortable and well lived in, as though nothing had ever been amiss. Life moved on, and only someone like me, who knew Moore before the storms, could really tell the difference.

But more than a decade later, May 3 lived on in the memories of the people who had survived that dreadful day. The damaged areas might have been rebuilt, but the tornado’s impact on the psyche took longer to heal, if it ever really did. Stories of past storms and all the terrible, incredible, and peculiar things they had done were passed down through the generations in Oklahoma like stories of war, and it was no different around here.

Residents of Moore who had been around for the ’99 tornado still remembered as though it were yesterday the way the sky had grown dark and ominous, how the air had been sticky with moisture. They recalled how the tornado had sounded, like a roaring freight train, as it indiscriminately chewed up everything in its path. They spoke of how it had smelled—like moist, tilled earth and freshly cut lumber—and how the ground had shaken as it swept through the city, a massive, dark cloud that seemed to swallow the entire sky. And when they retold the story of what it had been like on that Monday, they sometimes found it hard to breathe thinking of that sick helplessness they’d felt as it hit and after it had passed, leaving miles and miles of the city smashed to bits. They wondered how they would ever recover. But somehow they did—physically at least. And they did it again two more times after that. Still, every time thunderclouds rose up in the west aiming toward Moore, many in town wondered with a tinge of anxiety: Would this be another May 3?

 • • • 

It was a thought that ran through Steve Eddy’s mind almost every time severe weather exploded on the landscape west of town. As city manager of Moore, a nonelected position second in power only to the mayor and the city council, Eddy was in charge of making sure the city ran smoothly. Part of his job was to anticipate disaster—or at least plan for it and do what he could to keep the city in business. On this Monday, even before the sun was up, Eddy already had the wheels in motion, preparing for the bad weather that had been forecast for days—coming on that same familiar path from the west.

Almost every employee of the city government in Moore was on alert. The entire police and fire departments were on standby; the public works employees were ready to deploy. On the first floor of City Hall, the emergency management office had been a hive of activity all weekend, as severe storms pounded the region again and again. Just twelve hours earlier a tornado warning had been issued for Moore, but as Eddy, his deputy Stan Drake, and Gayland Kitch, the city’s emergency manager, had nervously monitored the radar and the wall-to-wall coverage on local television, the storm had stayed just to the south of town as it moved to the northeast, a narrow but fortunate miss.

Eddy had gone to bed that night grateful his town had been spared, but he knew he’d have to go through it all again the next day. For days meteorologists at the National Weather Service had warned him and other city officials in the region that radar patterns suggested Monday’s weather could be treacherous—possibly worse than the storms that had hit on preceding days, and those had been pretty bad. On Sunday he’d watched on television as a giant stovepipe of a funnel dropped to the ground about 15 miles east of Moore. For all the study that had gone into the storms that ravaged Oklahoma, weather was still an unpredictable game of luck and chance. While meteorologists had gotten incredibly skilled at forecasting the conditions that could spawn tornadoes, it was still a mystery where and when the funnel would drop, and when it did, there was little those in its path could do except take cover or get out of the way. One shift in the wind or a tweak in any of the other mysterious components that forced a funnel to the ground and that tornado would have hit Moore, and Eddy knew it.

As the city stirred to life outside his window, Eddy saw that the forecast hadn’t changed—in fact, it seemed to have grown worse overnight, and that concerned him. Meteorologists were forecasting that the storms would fire up in the midafternoon—not the early evening, when bad weather usually hit. He worried they could have an impact on schools, where classes didn’t let out until around 3:00
P.M.
or later, and on rush-hour traffic, as residents drove home after work. Scanning his e-mail, Eddy learned from a colleague that the Weather Service had scheduled a conference call for later that morning to go over what it was expecting. Although it was a routine call, he felt a twinge of dread. Eddy wished that storm season were over. Lately, bad weather wasn’t exclusive to the spring, but May was still the month when the worst seemed to roll through, the four weeks of the year he dreaded the most.

Eddy was a realist, but there was part of him that held out hope that Moore would be lucky and that whatever storms developed would stay to the north or the south. Part of him felt guilty for even having those thoughts. Knowing firsthand how horrific storms could be, he never wanted to wish bad weather on anybody. But he couldn’t help but hope that if storms did develop, Moore would somehow be spared. His town had seen its fair share of tornadoes. It didn’t need another.

At fifty-seven, Eddy had been working for the city government in Moore for almost half of his life. Like Simpson, he was a “lifer,” as people often refer to those who grew up in Moore and never left. While some moved away, to other cities in Oklahoma or out of the state altogether, many people in Moore stayed put, drawn in by something they couldn’t quite explain. Maybe that was why Moore still felt like a small town, even though it had transformed into a larger city over the years. Or maybe it was simply the people, how friendly they were and how resilient.

Eddy had moved to Moore when he was in second grade, and a few people in town still called him “Stevie,” as he was known back in grade school. Moore was barely a blip on the map when he and his parents arrived in town in the early 1960s, drawn by the ability to buy a nice house cheaply and the quiet allure of suburban life. As a child, Eddy had watched the new city slowly rise up around him, with new buildings, new schools, new homes, and a flood of new residents. In a single decade the population had jumped from a little under two thousand residents in 1960 to nearly nineteen thousand in 1970, a surge driven by an influx of families who liked the idea of living in a small town, but one that was still an easy commute to Oklahoma City and to the region’s other major employers—including the University of Oklahoma in nearby Norman and Tinker Air Force Base in Midwest City. But like other parts of Oklahoma, Moore was hard hit when the bottom suddenly fell out of the surging energy market in the early 1980s. It was the worst economic hit in Oklahoma since the days of the Great Depression, and tens of thousands of people lost their jobs in a matter of months, including many in Moore. The tiny suburb, once booming, suddenly went stagnant as businesses closed and some residents were forced to move to other states to look for work. But Eddy never gave up on his hometown.