The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (3 page)

This book is a story of Oklahoma’s relationship with the weather as told through the lens of what happened in Moore. It’s a story of that disaster, the hours leading up to the tornado, the suspenseful minutes during the heart of the storm, and the painful hours of reckoning afterward. It’s about the victims, the survivors, and the people who tried to help, all of them working tirelessly to tackle this horrifying natural disaster. It’s a story of death and destruction but also of survival and resilience. It is the story of the people of Oklahoma, who choose to live at the mercy of the sky in a part of the country where you can lose everything—your home, your business, even your life—in one unpredictable, violent storm.

G
ary England rarely sleeps in the springtime, and even though he was dead tired, with an aching fatigue that seemed to penetrate his bones, he had spent another night tossing and turning. All he’d hoped for was a little bit of shut-eye, a few hours of peace. But the sleep he so desperately needed had eluded him again, as it so often did at this time of the year, when tornadoes are most likely to embark on their destructive dance.

Lying in bed in his house on the northern outskirts of Oklahoma City, painfully tired but awake, England felt like a zombie. Worse than that, he was a zombie with tornadoes whirling through his head. It was like this every spring: When he would shut his eyes at night, terrible storms would rumble through his mind—conjuring horrible memories of death and destruction—only to collide head-on with the agonizing question of when the next one would hit. That’s what kept him up on nights like this: the trepidation that the next round of bad weather was about to begin.

That Monday he felt more unsettled than usual. Staring at the ceiling, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something really bad was going to happen, and every time he drifted off to sleep for even a few seconds, he was suddenly jolted awake by an overwhelming feeling of dread. It was like an alarm he couldn’t shut off that just kept sounding again and again. Bad weather had been in the forecast for a week. But how bad? He desperately needed to sleep, but his mind was too busy thinking, planning, worrying. How bad would this storm be? Would people be ready? Was he ready?

Well before dawn, England finally gave up and crawled out of bed, trying not to wake Mary, his wife of fifty-two years, who slept beside him. He padded down the hall to his computer, which was still on from when he’d left it a few hours before, its screen showing a radar image of Oklahoma. He looked at the small clock in the corner of the screen. It was just after 4:00
A.M
. He had been in bed less than three hours. He was tired, but the adrenaline was already starting to kick in, or maybe it hadn’t really subsided from the day before.

May 19 had been a late night at KWTV-9, Oklahoma City’s CBS affiliate, where Gary England had been forecasting the weather since 1972. His title was “chief meteorologist,” but he was more than just a weatherman. Yes, he did the daily forecasts, and yes, he was on television five days a week—sometimes more. But at seventy-three he was considered to be something of a weather god in Oklahoma, the most famous meteorologist in a state that has raised forecasting to an art.

It was the apex of storm season, and that Sunday had been particularly destructive. Two tornadoes had swept through the Oklahoma City metro, carving their way through the heart of England’s viewing area. One had hit just north of the city, in the suburb of Edmond, not far from the KWTV studio. An even stronger twister, a massive stovepipe of a storm with winds measuring at least 160 miles an hour, had touched down along the southeastern part of the metro area. It was stalked on live television from every possible angle by dozens of storm chasers on the ground and in the sky as it churned through the Oklahoma countryside, furiously devouring everything in its path.

England had been on air until almost midnight, directing the chasers linked to KWTV and monitoring the severe weather as it moved to the east. When the storms eventually petered out, the radar went quiet, and he headed home, the twisters continued to dance in his head, tormenting him with the dark questions that had increasingly come to consume him: How many people had died that night? Could he have done more to save them?

Late March to June is prime tornado season in Oklahoma, a time when the most dangerous thunderstorms of the year rumble across the plains, though they’ve been known to hit as early as January and as late as November. The threat of tornadoes has come to be a key part of Oklahoma culture and lore—the equivalent to watching Sooner football on a crisp fall Saturday or going to church on Sunday mornings. Football, Jesus, and tornadoes: That was Oklahoma. It was a fact of life, and everybody knew and accepted it when I was growing up.

Gary England was right at the center of that culture, a human warning system who had become synonymous with bad weather in a state that took a degree of pride in its designation as the epicenter of the nation’s “Tornado Alley.” Over the last thirty-five years, four of the most dangerous tornadoes on record had hit Oklahoma, and England had been on air for every one of them, not to mention the thousands of other twisters he had covered—both large and small. People often asked him how many tornadoes he’d been through as a meteorologist, but he had long ago lost count. “I’ve dealt with thousands of tornadoes,” he would say, with a weary grin. “And I feel like it too.”

Short and slight, with wheat-colored blond hair that had grown thinner over the decades, he did not look or act like the grandfather he was. He was known to sprint through the studio at prime moments of weather drama, thanks in part to the running shoes he’d taken to wearing with his suit since the camera never showed his feet. But he increasingly felt his age—especially during storm season, when the station would interrupt its regular programming to track bad weather as it moved across the state. Like other television stations in Oklahoma City, KWTV would sometimes go for hours without a commercial break during particularly dangerous storms, coverage that weather-crazy viewers around the state had come to expect. England was the star of the show, fueled by little more than pure adrenaline and the occasional sip of Diet Sprite—since tornadoes don’t tend to pause for bathroom breaks.

He would stare into the camera, talking to viewers for hours on end about the approaching storms while micromanaging the show around him. He directed the storm chasers out in the field and monitored as many as a dozen live video feeds from cameras mounted on cars and on the station’s helicopter, which flew into the storm to give viewers at home a bird’s-eye view of the weather. Behind him was a tiny army of young meteorologists, many recent graduates of the University of Oklahoma’s weather school, who had grown up watching him on TV. They now worked in his shadow, hoping to learn everything they could from the man who was revered as the godfather of weather coverage among storm junkies.

Since joining KWTV in 1972, he had pushed every boundary of television weather coverage. Some weathermen thought nothing of relying simply on data and radar information from the National Weather Service, but England considered himself as more than just a meteorologist. He was a soldier on the front lines who did whatever possible to keep his viewers safe from Mother Nature’s wrath, even if it meant violating protocol.

People still talked about a storm that had hit Union City in 1973, when England had broken into programming and declared a tornado warning minutes before the National Weather Service had. He had done so again and again over the years, much to the chagrin of scientists who criticized England as brash and reckless. A few years later, after reading an article that suggested Doppler radar could be a major advance in tracking tornadoes, England persuaded Channel 9 to invest in its own Doppler—even when it was unclear whether the technology really worked. England helped invent the tiny map at the bottom of a television screen that warned of coming storms, and under his guidance KWTV became the first station to deploy its helicopter to chase tornadoes. But it was his friendly folksiness and his tendency to be right about the weather that kept people tuned in. Sometimes it seemed he had a direct line up into the sky.

Over the years, KWTV, looking to spice up its coverage, had given him new toys to play with. For the 2013 storm season, it was a touch-screen radar that operated like a giant iPad, which at first mystified England, who had thought of himself as tech savvy. “Uh, all righty,” he said, as he poked at the screen trying to figure out how to zoom in and out during its first night on air. But in truth, none of the toys mattered. He himself was the star attraction—the hero of a generation of Oklahomans who either credited him with saving their lives or thought of him as the best source of entertainment in a state obsessed with storm coverage.

Long before The Weather Channel introduced tornado spotting as an adventure sport to most of America, weather coverage had become a tense and obsessive form of reality TV in Oklahoma, with local meteorologists and storm chasers playing key supporting roles in Mother Nature’s unpredictable script. England was the most famous and enduring character of this strange drama. On most days he had the stage presence of a small-town boy made good, with a folksy demeanor and deep Oklahoma twang that would be a career killer for most broadcast journalists today.

But his sunny presence on television could shift in an instant when he detected a storm brewing. Over his decades on air, viewers had come to know that when he took off his suit jacket and got serious, things were going to be bad, really bad. When he told people to take cover or to get out of the path of a storm, there was no question that they had better do it—or they could very well die. England had unfortunately been proved right again and again over his career.

In 2010 a popular Oklahoma City blog called
The Lost Ogle
conducted a poll of its readers to gauge the most powerful person in Oklahoma. England came in first, followed by Jesus in second place. From then on, the blog jokingly referred to him as “Lord England”—a nickname that to many wasn’t so far from the truth.

While KWTV’s ratings went up and down over the years, it was hard to think of anyone in Oklahoma who was more known or revered. His rivals at other stations sometimes beat him in the ratings, but no one came close to his stature. Elected officials privately cringed in fear that he might get the political bug someday and put them out of a job. After every big storm, lawmakers—from the governor to members of the state legislature—were quick to tell their constituents that they had consulted with Gary England about the weather, seeking his advice on storm preparations. In most cases he had far more credibility than they did.

But after forty-one years on the air, he was bigger than politics. He was a living legend, immortalized in newspaper cartoons as something of an antitornado superhero. His office was crowded with artwork that people from all over the state had gifted him at meet-and-greets. One painted him as a grinning hero in a cowboy hat wrangling an ominous, wild twister. Another cast him as a robed Obi-Wan Kenobi from
Star Wars
—Oklahoma’s “only hope” against dangerous weather. At the station’s front desk, visitors passed by a giant bronze bust of a smiling Gary England that had been given to the meteorologist in 2007, when he was named one of Oklahoma’s “100 Heroes and Outlaws” as part of the state’s centennial celebration. The selection committee, England liked to joke, had somehow mistaken him for a hero.

England had mixed feelings about the bust, which he passed on his way into the studio most days. He was flattered, but he was also a little embarrassed. He knew how lucky he was—a boy from a tiny town in northwestern Oklahoma who’d considered being a pig farmer until he’d caught the weather bug. He’d been recognized by the state for doing a job he absolutely loved. Sometimes the sculpture seemed a little too much like a memorial. Despite the ambitious meteorologists waiting in the wings in anticipation that he’d soon retire, England wasn’t done yet. He loved his job. He loved his viewers, and they loved him. And he was obsessed with finding ways to keep them safer from storms that seemed only to be getting bigger and deadlier every year.

He saw his job as more than being a local weatherman. It was a public duty, a calling, to keep people safe, and he wasn’t ready to walk away from that responsibility just yet. Some days, he did wonder if it wasn’t starting to be too much. It wasn’t the physical demands of the job, the hours on air, the giving up of any semblance of personal life for weeks on end every spring. It was the burden he felt to protect people, both viewers and his staff in the field. In the end, he knew he was just one man pitted against the elements, but knowing that didn’t make it easier when people died. He had dedicated his life to trying to prevent mass casualties from tornadoes like those that had hit towns around him when he was a kid—he’d never forgotten the storm in 1947 that wiped out Woodward, Oklahoma, killing more than one hundred people. But in recent years the pressure he felt to save people’s lives had started to consume him.

To his viewers and even many of his closest friends, family, and coworkers, he was his usual cheerful, folksy self—at least when the weather wasn’t bad. But privately he was haunted by storms. He couldn’t understand how in a state where people were so obsessed with weather, where local media was saturated with warnings, so many people continued to die. He constantly worried about whether he had done everything within his power to protect people. Had he said the right words or issued the warnings fast enough for people to take shelter? What more could he have done?

He had always been a bit of a worrier, consumed by thoughts like these. But his anxiety intensified after May 3, 1999, when a milewide twister wiped out parts of Moore and south Oklahoma City. That storm had changed his life. For the first time in his long career, England had essentially narrated live a nearly two-and-a-half-hour trail of destruction as KWTV’s helicopter hovered in the sky capturing every second of the monster storm churning its way into some of the most heavily populated parts of his viewing area. He was stunned as he saw debris from homes and cars flying through the air, carried like Matchbox toys. In his most calm but stern voice, he’d warned people they should get below ground or they would very likely die. But many hadn’t listened.

Thirty-six people had died—the biggest death toll in the state from a tornado in decades. With more than 10 miles of neighborhoods completely wiped off the map, many believe the death toll would have been far higher had it not been for the local weather coverage. In the days after the storm, state and local officials praised Oklahoma City’s weathermen for their handling of the storm. England was lauded for saving lives with his specific warnings pinpointing exactly where the tornado’s trajectory would take it and calling out street names in an urgent attempt to clear out the neighborhoods before it was too late. Many survivors credited him with protecting them that day. As the massive cleanup began, some spray-painted messages on whatever remained of their wiped-out homes. “Gary England saved my life,” one message, scrawled on a mangled garage door, read. “Thank you, Gary England!” said another.