The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (2 page)

The peculiar behavior of tornadoes was no mystery to me. I have been fascinated by storms ever since I was a kid, when I would watch them rumble past my house, scary but beautiful at the same time. I grew up during the oil bust in Oklahoma, and we didn’t have much money, so my mom entertained me by taking me to the public library, where we went spent hours at a time. Aside from poring over the Sweet Valley High series (which is what made me want to become a journalist, as one of the twins worked for the school paper), I didn’t waste much time with young-adult books. Instead, I checked out every volume I could find about storms and tornadoes, and what the library didn’t have I somehow persuaded my mom to buy, even on our limited income. I was probably the only nine-year-old kid in my neighborhood with a scientific field guide to storm clouds.

Despite my obsession with tornadoes, I had never seen one in person (and still haven’t). On many occasions when I was older, I’d drive toward threatening storms, hoping to catch a glimpse of a funnel cloud, though I never got too close. You never knew when one would turn on you, and when it did, size didn’t matter. “A tornado is a tornado,” my mother often told me. “No matter how big it is, it can kill you.” I even enrolled in a storm-chasing class when I was at the University of Oklahoma, entertaining the idea that, as a journalist, I might want to write about storms someday. But I dropped out after I was offered an internship at the
Chicago Tribune
’s Washington bureau for a semester, an opportunity that was too good to turn down—especially for someone who had never lived outside Oklahoma and longed to get away. When I moved to the East Coast for good after college to pursue my journalism career, I missed the storms. But the weather that began to roll through Oklahoma was unlike anything I’d experienced in my childhood.

Starting with the 1999 tornado, the storms back home seemed to be getting bigger and more violent. They were nothing like the tornadoes I remembered as a kid—storms I found to be absolutely terrifying were a tenth of the size of the twisters that have rumbled through Oklahoma in recent years. Some have attributed the dark turn in the weather to climate change, but the truth is, even the scientists who know more about tornadoes than anybody aren’t sure how to explain it. And that is what is fascinating about tornadoes. They hit so often, but scientists still know so little about what causes them and what is happening inside them that makes them so deadly. As one meteorologist told me, a tornado is like an iceberg, where the funnel is only a small glimpse, less than 10 percent, of the entire storm. People know more than they did thirty years ago, when the only warning that a tornado was coming was the neighbor’s roof blowing away. On May 20 the storm sirens sounded sixteen minutes before the tornado hit the ground—an eternity in tornado science—and the weather community is desperately working to expand that time.

There are some things about tornadoes that scientists will never understand. One of these is the unique relationship that people in central Oklahoma have with the bad weather that torments them every spring. No region in the country has been ravaged more frequently by killer tornadoes, yet people there would never dream of living anywhere else. During the May 3, 1999, tornado, my mom’s younger sister Betty lost her home. By then she and my Uncle Dale and their kids were living on a farm near Shawnee—east of Oklahoma City—but they had kept their first home in Moore, and it was wiped from the slab when the tornado moved through. Fourteen years later, on the night before the May 20 tornado, they were struck again. An EF4 twister with winds gauged at 166 miles per hour approached their farm, and Aunt Betty could see it moving across the valley right toward her. Up close the tornado looked nothing like she had expected. It was a giant wedge of a cloud that looked, she told me later, “like a column of boiling black water.”

As it drew close, she raced around the house gathering what she could to take to the basement. Important papers were already in the safe, but for some reason, as she ran around her bedroom, she grabbed a bottle of Versace perfume that she and my mother had found on an antiquing trip a few months before. Later, as she recounted the story, she couldn’t explain why that perfume had been so important, why she had suddenly been so determined to save it: a discontinued bottle of perfume from the 1990s, which she used only sparingly. “I guess your mom could have put a few drops on my dead body,” she said, with a laugh. “No tornado is going to take my fancy perfume.”

Her youngest son, Gordon, lived nearby but was in Oklahoma City that afternoon. He had tried to get to her before the storm hit, but she had urged him to stay away. She didn’t want him to get caught up in the storm trying to drive to the house, and on the phone he had started to cry, telling her that he didn’t want her to die. As the storm passed, the tornado ripped the roof off her house, destroyed several barns, and completely demolished Gordon’s home nearby. Fortunately, my aunt was safely sheltered in their basement, and she emerged to see not only the damage but also the puzzling things the storm did as it moved over their land. Several of their cows and horses were picked up by the tornado in the south pasture and carried nearly half a mile away to the north pasture. The animals were pretty scraped up, but amazingly none died.

My aunt has now been through two killer storms in fourteen years, not including all the near misses in between, when she watched tornadoes skirt her land. But not once has she considered leaving, not for a second. Instead, as she and Uncle Dale battled with the insurance company over the cost of rebuilding their home, she tried to find the humor in the situation. Things could always be worse, she pointed out. She could be dead. And the tornado hadn’t been totally ungracious. The storm had deposited on her doorstep a skinny, one-eyed calico cat, which followed her around, rubbing against her legs as she yelled into the phone at her insurance agent. She had no idea where the cat had come from.

While my aunt’s home was partially destroyed, the tornado left her neighbor’s home across the street completely untouched. But in a bizarre twist, a fierce lightning storm came through the next morning and struck that pristine house and burned it to the ground. Another sign, she said, that things could be much worse.

My mother’s attitude toward storms was no different. On the night of that terrible El Reno tornado, I finally reached her as the storm seemed to be redeveloping due west of her house. She was in an underground shelter across the street from her home at my Aunt Mary’s house—crowded with several of Mary’s kids, their children, and their dogs. The storm sirens were blaring, and it was raining and “blowing like the dickens,” she told me. Her phone was dying, and she told me she would call me later. A few miles to the west, a small EF1 tornado, with winds measured at 100 miles per hour, blew off part of the roof at the Oklahoma City airport and traveled east across the city before lifting. It was followed by intense flash flooding that killed thirteen people in Oklahoma City. Among the dead was an entire family that had crowded into a drainage ditch to take cover from the tornado and been washed away.

I tried to reach my mom again later that night and the next day, but her phone went straight to voicemail. I knew the power was out in her neighborhood and that she was probably okay, but the next day my ex-boyfriend, on the ground to cover the damage, asked for her address so he could go check. He texted me a picture of her house—a little windblown but still standing. When I finally reached her, she sounded weary but was almost blasé about her close call. She told me about driving through her neighborhood the morning after the storm and seeing roofs damaged and trees ripped apart. Around the corner from her house, she looked up and saw a giant trampoline impaled on a tree. “This is why I always say you should never buy a trampoline,” she told me, “because in Oklahoma, you are always going to end up owning one, even if you didn’t buy it.” I knew that her dispensing of random folksy advice was her strange way of coping, and all I could do was laugh.

The way my mom and her sister reacted to those two terrible storms perfectly encapsulates the attitude most Oklahomans have about living in an area so prone to deadly weather. They are resilient survivors, stubborn in their refusal to let nature get the best of them. It seems to be a spirit passed down through the generations, dating back to the days of the Dust Bowl, when a severe drought ravaged the land in unspeakable ways and forced many Oklahomans to migrate west. Those who survived—and, surprisingly, many did—wore it as a badge of pride, a sign that somehow they had triumphed over the worst Mother Nature had to offer. If only they had known what she would throw at their descendants in the decades to come.

That sense of satisfaction in surviving the elements is no different in Oklahoma today. Despite the fact they are smack-dab in the middle of the most dangerous tornado zone in the country, most Oklahomans never think about leaving or moving somewhere else. They argue that they are no crazier than Californians who suffer the constant threat of earthquakes or people in New Orleans, New York, or Miami who know that one giant hurricane could wipe out parts of their beloved city for good. “I could never leave,” my aunt told me. “You stay and you rebuild.”

And many have, even in Moore, where people have lost their homes, all of their belongings, even their loved ones to the killer storms that have taken aim at the city again and again. So many have chosen to stay, praying they might be spared from the next storm. Everybody agrees there will be one; the only unknown is when. People in Oklahoma describe it as living “at the mercy of the sky,” a saying I first heard my grandmother use when I was barely old enough to understand what storms were. Over the years, people in Moore and elsewhere in central Oklahoma have become amateur meteorologists as they have adapted to life in the danger zone of storms, attuned to clues of when bad weather is on approach.

When I was in Moore talking to survivors of the May 20 tornado, I couldn’t help but think of one of the most terrifying nights of my childhood. I was ten years old when a tornado swept through north of Oklahoma City. I still remember how a sunny afternoon suddenly turned into a dark and threatening evening. Moisture clung to the air, a wetness you feel only when a tornado is brewing. Jagged bolts of lightning lit up the sky, which was the color of an ugly bruise. The scariest part was how calm it was. That’s what you are taught to fear the most, a storm that is suddenly quiet, because that’s when the twister is about to hit. Unlike hurricanes or typhoons, which can spend weeks swirling and gathering strength over the ocean before landfall, tornadoes are still largely unpredictable. They appear and disappear, large or small, with little warning beyond signs that the weather conditions might be ripe. No one knows what’s going to happen or when, although the National Weather Service and others in the weather community have invested untold millions in money and manpower trying to figure that out.

On that night back in 1986, the tornado struck two housing additions in Edmond, a suburb of Oklahoma City, destroying nearly 40 homes and severely damaging 150 others. Fifteen people were injured, but no one died. I later found out the storm was two hundred yards wide—just over one tenth of a mile. To put that in perspective, the tornado that tore through Moore on May 20, 2013, was more than ten times its size and the El Reno tornado that followed eleven days later was thirty times larger. Had the funnel not lifted before it headed toward the more populated center of town, the level of destruction could have been reminiscent of an atomic bomb.

Meteorologists now believe these bigger storms are part of a larger trend, not anomalies, but they don’t know the cause. The tornadoes are not only getting bigger but also showing up at random times of the day and the year. It used to be that tornadoes would hit mostly in the springtime, in the early evening when the ground had warmed from a full day of sun, causing the warm surface air to rise and collide with the unstable air above. But two years ago Oklahoma was hit by a tornado in January, and there have been an increasing number of storms in the fall, around October—a “second spring,” as some locals joke. The May 20 tornado that hit Moore took place hours earlier than usual, in the middle of the afternoon, when kids were still at school.

When I arrived in Moore the day after the tornado, the stories of incredible bravery and horror were just beginning to be told—how teachers had thrown their bodies on top of their students to shield them from the storm, at great risk to themselves. How young mothers had done everything they could to shield their tiny babies whose lives had barely begun. One mother survived to tell the tale of how her seven-month-old baby girl had been sucked from her arms and killed. Another mother died cradling her four-month-old son in the tiny bathroom of a 7-Eleven where she had rushed to take cover when the storm hit. The store took a direct hit, and rescue workers who spoke of digging through the rocks and debris began to sob uncontrollably at what had been lost. But then there were miracles too, like what happened at Briarwood Elementary, where the entire building was leveled but no one died.

Within hours of the tornado, Moore, which had been through this routine so many times before, was already on the job of picking up the pieces. The city began hauling debris away and repairing the damage even before people could come to grips with the horrible scar that had been left on their city. That same day, the owner of the liquor store on SW Fourth Street, just four blocks north of where homes had been blasted away by the tornado, went outside and replaced the letters on his marquee that had been sucked away by the storm. His previous sign had been famous around town for its witty messages, but this one was simple. “We’ll be okay,” it read.

It was at that moment I knew I wanted to tell the longer story of what had happened here. As a native, I knew how people felt about the weather, how they loved it and feared it all at the same time. I wanted to know what it was like being in the path of a tornado that seemed bigger than life itself as it bore down on the city from the west. I knew I had to chronicle the story of those who survived one of the worst tornadoes in history—and those who didn’t make it. And I wanted to tell the larger story of how unique Oklahoma is because of the weather, the often crazy lengths to which the local media go in trying to cover the storms in a state where local meteorologists are more famous than celebrities.