The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado

VIKING

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Copyright © 2015 by Holly Bailey

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Map illustrations
by Sarah Schumacher

ISBN 978-0-698-17617-1

For my mother

C
entral Oklahoma has long been known as “tornado alley,” and anyone watching the news knows why. In May 2013 two of the strongest tornadoes on record hit the ground there in less than two weeks. On May 20 a milewide twister packing winds in excess of 200 miles per hour tore through the center of Moore, a quiet suburb south of Oklahoma City, killing twenty-five people and injuring several hundred. Among the dead were seven third graders at Plaza Towers Elementary, who died when their school building collapsed on top of them. It was the fifth tornado in fifteen years to sweep through Moore, a town that has been so unlucky with the weather that many locals refer to it as the “tornado alley of tornado alley.”

I spent most of my childhood in Moore. Though I lived a few miles away in south Oklahoma City, I went to school in Moore until I was fourteen, right on SW Fourth Street, a few blocks north of Plaza Towers. Many members of my family have called Moore their home over the years. Some still do, residing a mile north of where the May 20 tornado hit. Knowing their city’s track record with the weather, they jumped in their car that Monday and fled the storm, looking in their rearview mirror and praying that they would have a home to come back to when dark clouds had passed. It wasn’t the first time they’d had to run, and given Moore’s history, it probably won’t be the last.

The May 20 storm bore eerie similarities to a tornado that had slammed into Moore almost exactly fourteen years earlier. That storm, which hit on May 3, 1999, was so devastating that many Oklahomans still refer to it by its date alone—like their own version of 9/11. The May 3 twister was another milewide monstrosity that killed thirty-six people as it cut a deadly diagonal from just south of Oklahoma City through Moore. More than five hundred people were injured, some so horrifically it was a miracle they survived. The storm caused more than $1 billion in damage. In Moore alone it wiped out several entire subdivisions on the west side of town, reducing them to ruins.

The May 3 storm remains the strongest tornado ever recorded in the nearly one hundred years since scientists have been trying to understand the mysterious phenomenon of the tornado. At one point its winds clocked in at 302 miles per hour—the highest wind speed ever measured near the surface of the earth. The storm may in fact have been stronger, but nobody could get close enough to measure it at the epicenter. Meteorologists studying tornadoes have been forced to keep a safe distance from their subjects. The 1999 storm was so destructive it prompted the National Weather Service to rethink how it measured tornadoes on the Fujita scale, which was launched in the 1970s to categorize storms by size and wind speed. In 2007 scientists adopted the Enhanced Fujita scale, which factors in the damage left in a tornado’s wake to more accurately gauge how strong it was—though so much is still a guessing game.

In 2013 some neighborhoods that had been rebuilt after 1999 were hit again—a destructive second act that has never happened to any other city. But just when it seemed it might be an exact replay of May 3, the May 20 tornado turned slightly to the east, taking aim at the heavily populated central part of Moore. At points it became wider and moved more slowly than the previous storm, becoming what is known as a “grinder” as it took its time chewing neighborhoods into tiny bits. The storm left behind more than $2 billion in damage, giving it the dubious distinction of being one of the most costly tornadoes in history. The May 3 tornado had been ranked as an F5—the highest rating under the original Fujita scale. The tornado that hit fourteen years later was categorized as an EF5—the highest possible rating on the updated scale. Moore was suddenly one of the only cities in the world to have been hit twice, in almost exactly the same spot, by two maximum-strength tornadoes.

Before Moore had a chance to fully digest its latest unlucky bout with the weather, the storm sirens sounded again. Just eleven days later, on May 31, an even larger storm developed to the west of the city. A tornado that was at least 2.6 miles wide—bigger than the width of Manhattan—touched down in nearby El Reno, a few miles west of Oklahoma City, not long after Friday-evening rush hour. The El Reno storm, as it came to be called, is now the widest tornado on record. Fortunately, the tornado hit the ground in wide-open farm country, where houses were few and far between. Just as it began to aim east toward the more heavily populated city of Yukon, whose main road into town is named after its most famous son, the country singer Garth Brooks, and beyond that to Oklahoma City, it lifted, sparing Moore from another devastating hit. But it left behind irreparable damage. People still jittery over the May 20 tornado had jumped in their cars and tried to flee the storm at the last minute, clogging the roads as the twister approached. Four people—including a mother and her infant son, born just seventeen days earlier—died when the storm sucked their vehicles off the roads on and near Interstate 40, where the tornado’s nearly 300-mile-per-hour winds picked up 18-wheelers and twisted them like tinfoil.

The twister had been moving straight east, but out of nowhere it quickly changed direction several times, erratically veering northeast, then heading due north as it grew into one of the most violent storms in history. It then literally made a loop over Interstate 40, turning around to hit land it had already hit. It swerved west, then southwest, then south, then southeast and east again, covering several miles in just minutes. Nobody had ever seen a storm like it, and as it unpredictably danced all over the landscape, the tornado was so gargantuan that no one on the ground realized it was changing direction. It was so massive it had multiple vortices swirling around inside it—monsters within the monster—though you couldn’t see them until you were right up on it, at which point you were too close to escape. With no warning, the massive twister turned on people who had been chasing the storm, including crews from the local television stations and The Weather Channel, who were sending live video feeds when the tornado began raining debris down on them. Some were picked up in their cars and hurled off the road. Many had spent their careers warning people to avoid the path of a dangerous tornado, and now they found themselves unexpectedly discovering the consequences firsthand.

Three veteran storm chasers died that night. Their white Chevy Cobalt was found half a mile from where it was lifted up by the storm, crushed like a crumpled-up soda can, and dropped in the middle of a canola field. Still buckled in the passenger seat was fifty-four-year-old Tim Samaras, one of the most respected tornado scientists in the world. But even Samaras, who was not a risk taker in his pursuit of the strange monsters he had devoted his life to studying, was caught off guard by the El Reno twister, a weather system so destructive that someone later said it seemed as if it had been designed specifically to kill storm chasers.

Samaras’s car was so mangled—its engine and front two tires ripped away—that a state trooper on patrol almost didn’t recognize it was a vehicle when he saw it from the road. Inside he found Samaras dead, still strapped in the passenger seat. His shirt, shoes, and a single sock had been inhaled by the storm, but somehow his wallet containing his identification was in his pocket. Peering into the car, the officer saw the seatbelt in the driver’s seat was still buckled, but the seat itself was empty. Carl Young, a forty-five-year-old meteorologist and Samaras’s longtime chase partner, had been sucked away. His body was found half a mile to the west, facedown in a creek swollen by flash flooding. The next morning, just after dawn, officers found Samaras’s son Paul, who was twenty-four, a few yards away in the same creek, his body revealed only after the floodwaters had subsided.

 • • • 

When the El Reno storm hit, I was nearly 1,500 miles away at a concert in New York City, but I knew almost instantly that a twister had touched the ground. My iPhone lit up with a text message from a recent ex-boyfriend, a photojournalist living in California who was already booking a flight to Oklahoma because it looked like disaster was about to strike again. I ran outside and called my mother, who lived in south Oklahoma City—right in the storm’s path. She didn’t pick up, which wasn’t like her, and I began to worry. I flagged down a cab and headed home, pulling up live video of the storm on my iPhone from KWTV, the CBS affiliate in Oklahoma City that was renowned as the longtime home of Gary England, the weatherman who had gotten me through every storm as a kid. Every few minutes, I’d try to call my mother again. But there was no answer as the storm inched ever closer to her home.

It was a routine we went through almost every spring—bad weather would pop up in Oklahoma, and I would call to check in. But this time was different. Only days earlier I had gone back to Moore to cover the aftermath of the May 20 storm, and even though I had grown up around severe weather and at one point had even dreamed of being a meteorologist, it wasn’t until that trip home that I had realized in a visceral way how truly horrific and ruthless tornadoes could be.

By then I hadn’t lived in Oklahoma for fourteen years. I had left Oklahoma City in early 1999, bound for Washington, D.C., where I covered politics for various news outlets until I landed a gig at
Newsweek.
As the magazine’s youngest White House correspondent, I traveled to several war zones, including trips to Baghdad with President Obama and to Kabul with Vice President Cheney. I hadn’t even had a passport before I joined the White House beat, and suddenly I found myself in the same time zone as Osama bin Laden twice in the span of a few months. I was stunned by the pure devastation I saw in the volatile places we went, as motorcades sped past shelled buildings and landscapes so bombed out they resembled the moon.

In 2005, I witnessed a war zone closer to home when I was among the small pool of reporters who accompanied President George W. Bush on his first trip to the Gulf Coast to survey the devastation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In helicopters and later on the ground, we saw New Orleans, one of America’s most beautiful old cities, submerged under several feet of dark, swampy water. It was a sight and smell that none of us on that trip—Bush included, I’m sure—will ever forget. At one point the heat, humidity, and smell were so overwhelming that a reporter turned and vomited. And we were only visitors. In a few hours we would get back on
Air Force One
and fly back to Washington. I couldn’t imagine what the people of New Orleans, who couldn’t escape the disaster around them, were going through.

Yet none of that prepared me for what I found when I returned to Moore on May 21, 2013—less than twenty-four hours after the tornado had hit. As I steered my rental car along SW 149th, a street I had driven down countless times before, the landscape around me was unrecognizable. Under dark, ominous skies I passed large electrical transformers that had once stood as high as six-story buildings but were now bent and twisted into the ground. Every tree as far as the eye could see was shorn of its branches, its trunk whittled down to a giant slingshot. In the mostly rural farmland all around me, there were large swaths where tall grass had been literally sucked from the ground—bald spots that revealed the red, muddy earth below. In the fields where vegetation remained, the mix of grass and weeds seemed permanently bent toward the east—as if every blade had been sprayed into place with a thick coat of Aqua Net.

As I approached May Avenue, I began to see the outlines of familiar neighborhoods, but many homes were simply gone, wiped clean off their concrete slabs. I could see tiny figures picking through piles of debris in the distance, and with the road ahead blocked by downed trees and power lines, I pulled over, got out, and began to hike through a muddy field strewn with the confetti of people’s lives—photos, shoes, clothes, books, and toys, all carelessly tossed about. I even saw a child’s rudimentary drawing of a smiling blond woman, the pink construction paper tattered and wet but still somehow firmly tacked to a corkboard that had been blown off a wall somewhere. The oak trees that lined May Avenue were sheared off and covered in debris. They resembled grotesque Christmas trees, decorated in jagged pieces of metal and pink insulation that hung from their maimed branches. A king-sized mattress was impaled on one like a sick version of a holiday angel. The remains of a crushed car were wrapped around the trunk of one tree so closely that they looked like a discarded piece of chewing gum stuck to a pole by someone too lazy to throw it in a garbage can.

Even along the Gulf Coast after Katrina, I had never seen devastation like this. The fact that it was my city, my hometown, made the devastation that much more shocking. Standing there, a terrible odor hit me. It was the smell of death—worse than New Orleans after the hurricane. To my immediate right was a giant dead cow, bloodied and still, its eyes wide open as if in terror. About a dozen yards behind it were several dead horses that were being slowly pushed into a pile by a man in a gas mask driving a forklift. As I stood there in the middle of May Avenue, several residents gathered near me to watch, holding their noses and looking shell-shocked as thunder boomed in the distance and it began to rain. The horses had lived there, one man told me, but the cow he had never seen before, a terrible gift left behind by a tornado that had taken almost everything.

It was things that remained that surprised him. While his house was gone, reduced to a pile of scrap wood, he pointed to a home across the street—totally obliterated except for a chimney and a closet, where the missing door revealed clothes still on their hangers, just as they had been before the storm. The only sign something was amiss was a few spots of mud, spit out by the storm and splattered on a jacket sleeve as innocuously as dots of tomato sauce after a spaghetti dinner.

Farther into Moore, I found more signs of how strong, but also how peculiar, the storm had been. The local bowling alley had taken a direct hit that wiped out the entire building. But in the middle of the rubble, a line of bowling pins stood in precise formation on one of the dusty lanes. How had they not been knocked down by a storm so fierce that it destroyed almost everything in its path and shook the ground like a tiny earthquake? In some neighborhoods entire blocks were decimated by the tornado’s winds, reducing most houses to nothing but sticks, while on the next street some homes were unscathed except for a missing shingle or two and a coat of mud on the windows. One resident told me how her entire kitchen had been blown apart, her refrigerator sucked out and deposited onto a jungle gym at a playground down the block. But her vintage Fire King dishware, so old she rarely used it, had been left untouched in a nearby cabinet, without a crack or a scratch. “I guess the tornado didn’t like tulips,” she said matter-of-factly, referring to the red and yellow flowers adorning her dinnerware.