The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado

by Holly Bailey

  Some of the relationships between people at City Hall dated back decades, to long before they worked for the government. Eddy had known Glenn Lewis, the mayor, and Stan Drake, the assistant city manager, since they were students at Moore High School. They were the same age, and all had graduated the same year: 1973. They knew one another as well as they knew anybody, and that familiarity, personal history, and mutual trust came in handy not only in the storm recovery but also as the city underwent a major transformation in the aftermath of the storm.

  • • •

  To Eddy and other lifers, there was the Moore before the tornadoes and the Moore that existed afterward. Like everyone, he wished that his town had never known what it was like to go through a horrific twister—much less three of them. But at the same time, Eddy looked for the good in what had happened. The storms had sparked a dramatic revitalization in Moore—as if the twisters, as terrible as they were, had been some strange natural conduit for urban renewal. The wiped-out neighborhoods, rebuilt with brand-new homes, sparked a string of new development and investment that Moore hadn’t experienced since the days before the oil bust. Suddenly, a city that had been long been viewed as something of a no-man’s-land—a few unremarkable exits off Interstate 35 that people passed as they were driving between Oklahoma City and Norman—was reconsidered as an undiscovered paradise for the suburban working class. Young families who wanted to send their kids to good schools in a place where they could still afford to buy a home in a good neighborhood flocked to Moore, and businesses that saw an opportunity to make money followed.

  Between 1990 and 2000 Moore’s population lingered at just over 40,000 people—a number impacted by the number of people displaced after the 1999 tornado. But by 2010 the population had jumped to more than 55,000—a number that continued to steadily increase. Developers couldn’t keep up with the demand for homes, and the landscape of Moore began to shift from a quiet, mostly rural bedroom community to a suburban boomtown.

  People who had left Moore and came back to visit were astonished at how much their hometown had changed in such a short time. And even natives like Amy Simpson, who had never left, sometimes couldn’t believe it either. She and her family lived a little south of Nineteenth Street in a housing addition that was not even five years old. She was old enough to remember when this part of Moore had been mostly empty farmland, miles and miles of nothing but trees and grassy fields and the occasional bored cow, which tilted its head up and stared at cars cruising the narrow back roads, rough and bumpy, that hadn’t been repaved in years because they saw so little traffic.

  When I was growing up, anything south of Nineteenth Street in Moore was considered “out in the country.” But what had been a simple two-lane country road was now a four-lane thoroughfare, one of the busiest stretches in town, lined on both sides with shopping centers that had been built a few years earlier but still looked brand-new. It used to be that people in Moore would have to drive 10 miles south to Norman or north to Oklahoma City to do their shopping, but now big-box retailers were right here on Nineteenth Street: Target, Walmart, Home Depot. The only Starbucks in town was on the corner, next door to the perpetually crowded Chick-fil-A, where the drive-through window would open for breakfast and remain swamped until closing time, as cars wrapped around the building in endless want of a chicken sandwich. It was hard to believe that less than twenty years earlier there hadn’t even been a traffic light on the block—just stop signs that drivers often floated through because there was nobody around to yield to.

  When Simpson was a student at Moore High School, most of the kids in town spent their Friday nights cruising in slow circles around the city like a scene out of American Graffiti, talking and listening to music and rolling down their windows to yell to friends in other cars. They went up Twelfth Street, down Eastern Avenue in front of the high school, and all the way back down Fourth Street, past the three towering antennas of KOMA, one of the oldest radio stations in the state. Back then the towers were the closest thing Moore had to a landmark, their red and white lights blinking a slow, mesmerizing code that could be seen as far as 20 miles away across the flat landscape. The only other iconic symbol of Moore was the local water tower, which for decades had been painted with a gigantic American-flag smiley face before it was replaced with the town’s name in the mid-1990s.

  Now the biggest landmark in town and the major hangout was the Warren Theatres, a massive seventeen-screen cinema a few blocks north of Nineteenth Street that was widely regarded as the best movie house in the entire state. Outfitted with an IMAX theater, it was easily one of the biggest buildings in town, eclipsing the forty-five-bed hospital next door. Many in the area had been shocked when the theater chose to locate in Moore, a town that had for years been snootily regarded by its neighboring cities as a mostly unremarkable city that wasn’t even worth pulling off the highway for.

  Moore had expanded so much that it was growing hard to tell where the town ended and the neighboring cities began—especially on the west side, which bordered Oklahoma City. In recent years new homes had cropped up on the landscape like unstoppable weeds. There weren’t enough houses to meet the demands of families who wanted to send their kids to the public schools in Moore, a district that included part of south Oklahoma City. Developers offered big money to farmers willing to sell off their land. While some signed their property over, many still hung on, unwilling to give in to the suburban sprawl.

  Running out of space on the west side, Moore had started to expand south toward Norman, a bustling college town of 118,000 that housed the University of Oklahoma, where I went to college, like so many other kids who grew up in Moore. New housing additions and retail developments began to replace the empty countryside along Interstate 35. To people who hadn’t been paying close attention, Moore seemed to have transformed overnight from a sleepy suburb into a boomtown, a city that seemed to be thriving even when the national economy wasn’t.

  But Moore’s rebirth was accompanied by nervousness. Many in town cast a wary eye toward the west, wondering if Mother Nature would come and take it all away. A town reborn in part because of a tornado had now expanded into an even bigger target. Around town there was an odd dynamic: People didn’t want to believe God could be callous enough to send another tornado to Moore. But at the same time many believed it would almost certainly happen.

  Just a few months earlier a town-hall meeting had been organized by a pair of meteorologists from the University of Oklahoma who had partnered with the National Weather Service to find out what people believed about the weather. The idea was to study superstitions and myths about storms in Oklahoma as a way of understanding how to better communicate the risks of bad weather. At the meetings many old wives’ tales resurfaced. In nearby Norman residents told researchers they felt their city had been spared by storms because the town had been built on an old Native American burial ground. The spirits, they said, had kept the storms away. It was a story that had circulated for generations, though there was little evidence to back it up. Only a few months earlier a small tornado had gone right past the University of Oklahoma, forcing even meteorologists at the National Weather Service, located on the south side of campus, to take cover.

  But it was the people in Moore the scientists found most interesting. Around forty people showed up at the local community center—about three times the turnout in other towns. And for more than an hour, residents young and old took turns speculating aloud as to what it was about Moore that made it so unlucky when it came to the weather. Many had shown up not only to share what they thought about the weather but also to find out what others thought—searching for answers to a mystery that baffled even the scientists who knew more about tornadoes than anyone.

  One woman, whose home had been destroyed in 1999 and then again in 2003, asked whether it was something about the elevation of the city. Others wondered if it was the city’s location east of the South Canadian River that someho
w made it vulnerable. All of the tornadoes that had hit Moore over the years had formed just south of the river, near Newcastle, before moving to the northeast toward Moore. People wondered if it wasn’t something about the mostly dry riverbed that channeled the storms their way, and as they speculated, they looked at the scientists, longing for answers. But there were none. Even they didn’t know why Moore was so unlucky.

  At the end of the night, as they had at all their meetings, the scientists asked participants to list the city they believed was most at risk of being hit by future storms. Residents of other cities had been unanimous: It would be Moore. And in Moore the answer was the same: Moore would be hit again. It was only a matter of when. The researchers were caught off guard by how resigned people seemed to their fate. They didn’t sound defeated—just accepting. “They happen, and they happen to us,” one man said.

  It was an attitude that Eddy understood. He’d heard it from plenty of people over the years. After the tornadoes he’d worried that people might move away from Moore, concerned about living in a town that had been hit by storms that had followed eerily similar paths. But while some did move away, others stayed put—and new residents joined them, hoping and praying the storms would stay away. Eddy knew his job wasn’t to try to understand the whys and hows of the storms. But there were moments when he couldn’t help himself, and he’d quizzed meteorologists about the theories he’d heard over the years. Nobody knew. It all seemed to be just bad luck.

  As he left his house that morning to head to his office, Eddy felt that familiar feeling in the air. He knew another storm was coming, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. All he could do was prepare for the worst and hope God or luck would be on Moore’s side.

  CHAPTER 3

  8:00 A.M., MAY 20

  The sun was barely up when Rick Smith reached his desk at the National Weather Service in Norman. It felt like he had never left. His computer was still on, and he thought he could feel a hint of warmth in his chair, though he knew that was just in his head. His wife sometimes teased him about her missing husband. “Have you seen him?” she’d ask with a mischievous smile. She knew as well as he did that this was just the way it was in the stormy month of May. It’s how it had always been in the twenty years since he’d joined the National Weather Service as a meteorologist—and even before that, when he was just a kid staring up at the clouds above Memphis. He’d always been watching and waiting for the perfect storm.

  Smith had turned forty-nine a few months earlier. His once-dark-blond hair had grown thinner and was almost white now, giving his skin a pinkish glow. Behind his wire-rim glasses one could detect a few more lines around his blue eyes, signs of a life well lived. But even as the calendar ticked forward, he still felt like that kid looking up at the sky. The mystery was as compelling to him now as it had been when he was just a boy. Early on in his career, he’d been out in the field spotting storms for the Weather Service, chasing tornadoes along the back roads of Tennessee, Arkansas, and occasionally Oklahoma. But now he mostly followed the storms through a bank of computer screens and on television, and though he sometimes missed that smell and how the sky looked as it transformed everything around him, it wasn’t any less of a thrill.

  He’d started out as a forecaster, but over the years he had become something of a do-it-all at the Weather Service. He trained storm spotters. He dealt with the media. His official title was “warning coordination meteorologist,” which meant it was his job to talk to emergency services and other government officials in cities that were likely to be hit, getting out as much advance warning as possible. Recently he’d taken on another increasingly important task: He ran the agency’s Twitter and Facebook feeds when things heated up.

  While most people in Oklahoma watched storm coverage on television, Smith agonized over how to reach those who didn’t—those who had no television or had become blasé because there were so many storms. People always said they were afraid of getting hit by a tornado, but the truth was many didn’t actually believe it could happen to them. Those were the people Smith worried about the most—the ones who had grown used to the weather and had stopped taking it seriously. Social media, he hoped, might be a way of getting warnings out to them.

  The night before, he had been at the office almost until midnight. It had been a day of unusually high drama at the Weather Service, which was saying something. Oklahoma had been in the midst of a severe-weather outbreak for days, as massive storms meandered through the central part of the state. Spring was often like this, endless hours on duty, living on coffee and Diet Coke and whatever else the vending machines downstairs offered, waiting and wondering what Mother Nature would do.

  Just before 5:00 P.M., things had gotten weird. A cloud had popped up on radar just to the west of the office and then exploded into a large, rotating thunderstorm—known in weather terms as a supercell. The ominous storm began to suck the air and energy from everything around it as it crouched down and grew wider on the landscape. Inside the forecasting center one of the meteorologists calmly issued a tornado warning for the storm almost directly above their heads, maintaining such a cool and steady focus one might have been forgiven for thinking it was all happening hundreds of miles away.

  There was no panic or yelling—beyond the voice of a frantic storm chaser echoing from one of the giant monitors that would stream the local television stations on bad-weather days. While it was Armageddon on television—and outside the window too—the Weather Service was a quiet hum of activity, like a bank on payday.

  On particularly bad-weather days, forecasters will sometimes get a little edgy, but this is only really apparent to people who know them well enough to notice the chink in their calm veneer. Over the years, Smith had become adept at reading their body language. He monitored the radars and absorbed the data just like everyone else, but he was also able to detect that slight difference in temperament, the way someone’s jaw would tense or brow furrow, or that hint of something in the voice. It was his gauge of how bad a severe-weather day was likely to be. If they were nervous, he was nervous. And on that day you could slice the tension with a knife.

  The National Weather Service offices are located on the second floor of the sprawling National Weather Center, at the southern end of the University of Oklahoma campus in Norman. Only a decade before, the area had been mostly empty farmland, but the NWC, as it was known, had quickly transformed the landscape when it opened in 2006, a gleaming, nearly 300,000-square-foot glass-and-brick monument to the study of weather. You could see it from more than a mile away, especially at night, when, lit up like a giant cathedral, it stood out sharply against the dark woods of Highway 9.

  That it looked like a church seemed fitting. If tornadoes were something of a religion for those who followed them, central Oklahoma was the holy land, and this building was a sacred place that drew in those who were most captivated by the mystery of the storm. Virtually every major weather agency in the country could be found here. Down the hall from the National Weather Service were two sister agencies: the Storm Prediction Center, an arm of the Weather Service that does severe-weather forecasting for the entire country, and the National Severe Storms Laboratory, which leads research into the genesis of storms and seeks to develop technology to better predict them. Upstairs on the fifth floor were the offices and classrooms of the University of Oklahoma’s School of Meteorology, widely considered the Ivy League of weather programs, where some of the nation’s leading scientists were training the next generation of meteorologists.

  Over the years, the NWC had become a weather mecca, drawing pilgrims from around the country. In the surrounding few blocks the university had built out roads leading to office buildings that were so brand-new there was no grass on the lawns out front, just freshly raked dirt. Inside, offices were rented to private companies in the weather business eager to be as close as possible to the scientists with whom they partnered on projects like improving ra
dars and coming up with new and better ways of presenting weather data. Already there wasn’t enough space to meet the demand.

  On the east side of the burgeoning weather campus was a giant white dome with diamond-shaped indentations that, sitting high on stilts in the trees above Highway 9, resembled a gigantic golf ball teed up for play. It was the radar that changed everything about weather forecasting. The Doppler radar was first employed by the air force to track enemy positions during World War II, but military officials soon noticed that the short pulses of radio waves emitted by the radar were also picking up details about storms. The Doppler could measure the intensity of precipitation within a storm as well as its development and movement. But it wasn’t until decades later, in the 1950s, that it was officially adopted as a weather-forecasting tool.

  Doppler radars now dot the landscape of central Oklahoma—there are at least four in Norman alone, positioned to capture the storms that regularly roll up from the southwest—but in 1969, when the Severe Storms Lab relocated its offices from Kansas City, the first Doppler radar to be used for weather purposes was installed just outside its offices along Interstate 35 in Norman. It was surplus equipment handed over by the air force. Back then the locals eyed the giant golf ball–shaped radar with curiosity, wondering how something so weird looking could possibly help them understand the freak, killer storms that hit with almost no notice.

  Four years later the radar proved its usefulness. In May 1973, when a giant F4 tornado blew through Union City, about 30 miles west of Oklahoma City, the Doppler radar in Norman captured for the first time the entire life cycle of a twister. It was a breakthrough that changed the science of weather forecasting forever. For the first time scientists could see how a tornado had come to life, how it had picked up in intensity and then, just as suddenly, faded away. The radar had revealed signs of a possible tornado developing long before it actually hit the ground—proving that it might be possible to expand warning times exponentially for potentially deadly storms. It was the official beginning of decades of research into storms that nobody really understood.