The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (13 page)

That morning had been a blur of love and hugs. Simpson had dressed up for the awards—wearing a nice dress and a pair of open-toed sandals with kitten heels. She’d cheered and clapped for the first and second graders as enthusiastically if they were her own, and then she’d hugged and joked with the parents who had shown up, making them feel important too. They were all partners, after all, in building up these tiny little humans.

Before lunch Simpson had helped the sixth graders practice for Recognition Night, which was essentially their graduation ceremony before heading off the next fall to junior high. It was scheduled for Tuesday night at the school, and Simpson had weeks ago come up with what she considered to be the perfect song to play as they marched down the aisle to accept their certificates marking yet another step in the journey toward adulthood. She had picked “Baby I’m a Star” by Prince, from the
Purple Rain
soundtrack, a mainstay from her own childhood in Moore. It was fast and upbeat, and as the kids practiced marching down the aisle, they strutted like little peacocks, happy and blissful. Simpson found herself grinning and laughing with them, her eyes a little moist. She hoped that all of their days would be as happy as this. Outside the sun peeked through the clouds. Maybe the storms would hold off, she thought. Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as they were saying.

But at 2:00
P.M.
, as she sat in her office awaiting the arrival of a candidate who was interviewing for a teaching position set to open in the fall, Simpson looked out at the dark sky and started to worry. Down the hall the kids were starting to get antsy too. In Baxter’s kindergarten class they were getting scared and nervous at the sounds of the rumbling thunder. To soothe them the teacher took out paper and crayons and began drawing clouds and the sun as she talked to them about the weather and how it could be stormy at times. And as they worked, she began to notice kids from other classes walking down the hall toward the front office. It kept happening, dozens of kids were walking by.

Around 2:30
P.M.
Simpson was wrapping up her interview when she heard a series of ominous beeps—some from cell phones and one from a weather radio near the front desk. There was quick knock at her door and as it opened, her assistant, Penny, stuck her head in. Her eyes were as wide as saucers, and Simpson knew instantly that something was wrong. “There’s a lot of parents out here,” Penny told her. “Okay, how many?” Simpson said, trying to read the clues on her staffer’s face to see what was being left unsaid. “More than usual,” Penny replied, alarm in her voice and all over her face.

Simpson quickly wrapped up the interview. It wasn’t unusual for parents to pick up their kids early on storm days, but when she emerged into the main lobby of the front office, she walked into chaos. She found a long line of terrified adults—too many to count—looking out the windows and checking their phones as they waited to sign out their children. The way it usually worked was that parents would sign a form, and then their kids would be called or escorted to the office, but Simpson knew instantly it wouldn’t work that way today. She had never seen a group of people who looked more anxious or afraid. Fear seemed to be wafting off them, and Simpson raised her voice and told the parents that they could walk back toward the classrooms and pick up their kids and stop back by the office on the way out to confirm they had their child. It was hardly usual procedure, but there were no strangers in the room. Simpson knew almost all of their names and faces—though she’d never seen them this agitated. Still, she didn’t ask what was happening. Between the look on Penny’s face and the parents, she knew something bad was coming.

Outside the rain began to pour in sheets, and the wind howled. Giant pieces of hail began to pelt the building—banging off the skylights so hard that Simpson worried the glass might shatter. Then, as it had earlier in the day, the wind briefly let up. It was then Simpson heard a sound she had dreaded—a sound she couldn’t believe she was actually hearing. It was 2:40
P.M.
and the tornado sirens in Moore started to wail. Around the room her staff began to look panicked and the parents grew even more terrified, running out of the office toward their kids’ classrooms.

Without missing a beat, Simpson calmly walked to the school intercom, which hung on the wall closest to her office door. “Get into your places,” she ordered. She was calm and firm—just as she knew she needed to be. She barely recognized the sound of her own voice. Something had taken over.

I
t began as nothing more than a wispy little funnel, dancing shyly between the clouds and the ground in the countryside just north of Newcastle, a tiny farming town southwest of Moore. From certain angles it looked like nature’s version of a needle on a record player, innocently dropping to the ground before gently lifting right back up, as if guided by some unseen force looking for that one perfect song on a vinyl LP.

This dance has long captivated generations of weather-obsessed Oklahomans: the moment when something so unearthly suddenly swirls to life in the wide-open prairie sky, giving rise to a feeling of childlike wonder but also a sobering sense of dread. While some storms are quick to erupt, others, like this one, seem to draw out the mystery—flirting with the ground but never quite touching, as if deliberately prolonging the tension.

Over the years, in the full bloom of modern-day weather coverage, this scene of true uncertainty—would the storm actually produce a tornado?—had transformed one of the few genuinely suspenseful moments of life in this part of the country into something even more dramatic. Through the lens of television, the mystery had become a breathless, edge-of-your-seat roller-coaster ride. The anxiety—and to some the thrill—of not really knowing what the weather would do was the prime attraction of the increasingly tense reality show of storm season in Oklahoma. People watched not just because they were scared for their lives but also because they couldn’t tear their eyes away from the undeniably riveting theater of nature’s fury.

That Monday, in a state still jittery from the twisters that had just swept through, was no exception. Shortly before 3:00
P.M.
, the point in the afternoon when local television would normally be airing the final climactic moments of the daytime soaps, viewers were instead tuned in to a drama of another kind unfolding in the skies south of Oklahoma City, where it now appeared that the storm near Newcastle might drop a tornado at any second.

The unscripted thriller had been anticipated for hours, even days. And though it was developing just as the National Weather Service had warned it might, there was an air of almost stunned disbelief even among those who had put the forecasts together. What they were seeing was the worst-case scenario, a nightmare thunderhead that was growing in size and strength by the second. A storm that, if it kept its current track, was headed right toward Moore.

In a horrifying cosmic unity, many of those tracking the storm—the scientists down in Norman, the Oklahoma City television weathermen at their rival studios, the town officials at Moore’s City Hall and many of the people in the storm’s path—had the same terrifying sense of déjà vu as they thought back to the deadly tornado that had come along this very same path fourteen years earlier. In so many ways it seemed like May 3, 1999, all over again—except this storm was gathering force hours earlier, when many kids were still in school, and the farmland that had been ravaged back then was now occupied by hundreds of new homes in a booming suburb that had dramatically increased in size. Many more people were at risk.

Twenty-five miles to the north Gary England was on air in the chaos of KWTV’s studio, anxiously toggling among the increasingly ominous images beamed back by his team of storm chasers, who were themselves growing more and more panicked at what they were seeing. The radar showed the storm quickly intensifying, with winds upward of 200 miles per hour feeding into the updraft, suggesting a dangerous tornado was imminent.

On air England steeled himself to appear calm and authoritative, believing that he better served the public by remaining focused and telling them clearly where the storm was heading. He wanted to be the steady hand that people for decades had come to rely on in moments of crisis like this. But inside he felt a mix of dread and anxiety over what this storm might do. It wasn’t just the fear of experiencing May 3 all over again—though, like others, he couldn’t stop thinking back to that terrible day, a memory that always seemed to come up when storms erupted to the west of the city. It was more than that. Looking at the landscape, at all those new buildings in south Oklahoma City and Moore that showed up as place markers on the radar, he worried that this storm could be so much worse because there was simply so much more to destroy. As he glanced at a live image of the storm, zeroing in on the point where the funnel seemed to be flitting down once again, that morbid question that always haunted him in storm season was again dancing in his head: How many people were going to die?

By then the drama playing out west of Moore had gone national. The Weather Channel and twenty-four-hour cable news networks had picked up the live feeds of the Oklahoma City television stations and added their own breathless commentary. England and his counterparts at KFOR and KOCO had at this point been on air for almost two hours—since around 1:00
P.M.
, well before the first storms erupted near the Texas border. While the sky was hazy from the thick humidity, the sun was still shining in and around Oklahoma City when the stations broke into regular programming. But with the dry line inching its way into the central part of the state from the west and threatening to collide with the thick coat of moisture hanging over Oklahoma City like a fog, the atmosphere was so unstable it was like a ticking time bomb. England now thought the worst could happen at any second and that it would escalate quickly from there.

Within a half hour the bad weather began to roll in, pounding the Oklahoma City area with high winds, heavy rain, and, in some spots, hailstones the size of baseballs. On air the stations alternated between shots of sinister-looking clouds and increasingly vivid Doppler radar imagery of storms that appeared to be exploding like fireworks. The radar, which uses different colors to rate a storm’s intensity, produced vivid Technicolor images that looked like something you’d see peering through an old-fashioned kaleidoscope. The weather fronts were going from green to yellow to orange to crimson, a color used only for the most dangerous storms, almost as quickly as the radar could update.

But as bad as these storms were, it was a tiny blip of a cloud that suddenly popped up in the sky a few minutes before 2:00
P.M.
about 30 miles southwest of Moore that sent the forecasters into genuine panic. At KFOR Mike Morgan, who had been a nervous wreck all day, was on air wearing his trademark severe-weather sparkly tie—this one in tones of blue and silver—when he first saw the telltale signs of a tornado on the radar just north of a town called Chickasha. It was a speck of a cloud that seemed to “blow up out of the clear blue sky,” as he put it. Dashing off camera, Morgan frantically grabbed his iPhone to text his cavalry of storm chasers and redeploy them in that direction. As he did so, he watched the cloud begin to spin like a top. It was something he had rarely seen in all of his decades obsessing about the weather, and his heart began to race.

Down the block at the KOCO studios, Damon Lane was seeing the same thing and feeling a similar sense of alarm. In a period of about twenty minutes, he watched as the cloud, which continued to rotate, quickly erupted into a full-fledged thunderstorm, picking up wind and speed as it headed toward south Oklahoma City and Moore. But then, in the farmland north of Newcastle, the storm suddenly slowed down, even as it began to rotate ever more furiously and grow increasingly dark and ominous in the western sky. It was like a bull that had stopped to build up its strength before charging at its target. And as it did so, that slender funnel began to tease—but not touch—the land below, slyly hinting at what was to come.

Though he maintained his cool on air, Lane was panicked. What was happening was more than just a storm. It was suddenly very personal. Moore was his home, and if the storm moved due east, it would come very close to hitting his house on the eastern side of town. A little while earlier, when it had become clear that the storm might be aiming toward Moore, he had texted his wife Melissa, who was at work at a nonprofit near downtown Oklahoma City, and suggested she head home early to get into the shelter with their two dogs, Skyler and Binx, who were in the backyard and would be helpless against the storm. Just after the tornado sirens began to wail in Moore at 2:40
P.M.
, she had texted him to say she was on the road, and though Lane knew she had time—it was usually just a fifteen- or twenty-minute drive at most from her office to Moore—he began to worry that she was cutting it too close. Should he tell her to turn around and drive back to safety? But if he did, what would happen to his dogs?

By then every excruciating moment of the storm’s terrible buildup was playing out via live camera feeds from an army of chasers on the ground and in the sky who were tracking the incipient tornado as a hunter stalks its prey. As the funnel appeared and disappeared again and again, the event began to take on the tense air of a standoff between the monster in the clouds and the adrenaline-pumped chasers below, who started to sound a little like overexcited sportscasters calling a play-by-play. “Here it comes! Here it comes!” KWTV’s David Payne frantically yelled at one point from his position along 149th Street, east of the storm, as the funnel slowly began to descend toward the ground. “Wow, guys, look at the spin! Look at the spin!” he cried, yelling into his phone so intensely that his voice became almost distorted on air. Within seconds the would-be tornado was gone again, swallowed back up into the towering black wall of cloud that, for people watching at home, now took up the entire television screen.

In some ways, what was happening was a moment of triumph for weather coverage, the full display of how far journalism, technology, and science had come in dealing with the deadly storms that had routinely killed people with little warning as recently as twenty years ago. Now, with their streaming video from the field and the pinpoint precision of advanced Doppler radar, Oklahoma’s weather media had become an army of first responders, giving people in the storm’s path an unprecedented level of advance notice that saved untold numbers of lives.

But for England, who had devoted so much of his life to trying to keep the public safe from storms like this, it was hard to feel anything but concern. In his gut he had known almost from the moment he saw that tiny cloud spinning in the air near Chickasha that it was going to be the storm everyone had been fearing all day. Though he was not an idealist, part of him privately hoped for that rare miracle. Maybe the storm, as bad as it looked, wouldn’t fully develop; maybe it would go away as quickly as it had come. He knew it was wishful thinking, but it wasn’t unheard of. There had been plenty of instances over the years of the Doppler picking up every ominous sign that a tornado was coming—the strong winds, the intense circulation, and that familiar hook shape that develops on the radar when the rain is carried into the updraft of a rotating storm. But sometimes, in the rarest of cases, a tornado never actually touched the ground. England was always thankful for the reprieve—though viewers didn’t often agree. They made their displeasure known in phone calls and angry e-mails, complaining that he’d interrupted their television shows for nothing. What he would give for a few angry e-mails to make this monster go away.

He was brought back from his reverie by a commotion in the studio. “Guys, we have a tornado here,” Jim Gardner, the station’s helicopter pilot, called out over the radio from his position about a mile south of the storm—though his bird’s-eye view made him seem so much closer. It was 2:55
P.M.
, fifteen minutes after the tornado sirens had gone off in south Oklahoma City and Moore and almost forty-five minutes since the National Weather Service and local TV stations had begun warning people in the storm’s path that it could turn deadly. A slender gray vortex had finally emerged from the clouds, and at 2:56
P.M.
, according to the National Weather Service, it was officially on the ground. As seen from Gardner’s helicopter, which was flying at eye level to the storm, the tornado had dropped to the ground so gracefully, so casually, that it almost belied the true horror of the moment. A nightmare storm, getting stronger by the second, was now heading directly for Moore.

 • • • 

As the world watched, it suddenly morphed into a hulking beast devouring everything in its path, which at that moment wasn’t much beyond trees and the occasional farm. The twister initially took the form of a towering gray stovepipe. It began to slice through electrical wires as easily as a marathon runner tearing through ribbons at the finish line. And as it did so, bright flashes lit up the funnel at its base, giving it an effect so horrifying it looked like something Hollywood might have dreamed up. But this wasn’t computer-generated imagery. Within seconds the tornado had swelled into a raging monster at least half a mile wide and growing, its rotation and winds so violent that it began to drag the entire cloud structure around it to the ground. On air England, who tried to remain calm, began to read off the streets in the path of the storm, and as he did so, a massive explosion of something briefly illuminated the demonic funnel. “My god,” England cried out, the horror in his voice palpable, “get below ground if at all possible!”

 • • • 

At the National Weather Service in Norman, about 15 miles to the southeast of the storm, forecasters in the second-floor command center decided to issue the most dire warning possible: a “tornado emergency” for south Oklahoma City and Moore. It was an alert reserved for only the most devastating storms, the ones that are 100 percent guaranteed to hit, when people’s lives are determined to be at most risk. To those who didn’t know better, the room seemed unusually calm, a stark contrast to the increasingly frantic television coverage that was playing on the giant screens mounted at the front of the room.

But at the workstations those who had been trained to remain cool under pressure were visibly tense. The potentially deadly tornado they had been warning people about all day had exploded to life right in their backyard, not far from their homes and those of friends and family. This was their city under attack. Rick Smith, who had been manning the agency’s social-media feed all day, began to send out urgent messages to the public, knowing that even with the saturation coverage and all the warnings, not everybody listened when advised to take cover. “This is as serious as it gets,” Smith wrote on the organization’s Twitter feed. “Please seek shelter now!”