by Holly Bailey
A registrar at the Federal Aviation Administration, she was at her office near the Oklahoma City airport when she first saw reports of bad weather developing to the south. It was the usual routine in Moore, where she’d lived for half of her life, but this storm looked more treacherous than the bad front that had moved through the previous day. Concerned, she called the administration office at Southmoore and asked that her daughter be released early. Then she phoned Alyson and told her to go their home on SW Fourteenth, a few blocks west of Plaza Towers Elementary. She was leaving work early and would meet her there, she said. She promised to be home soon.
With the clouds growing more ominous by the second, her coworkers had urged her to wait out the storm at work, arguing that it was too dangerous to drive into Moore. But even as the emergency sirens began to wail, she wouldn’t stay put. She needed to get to her daughter, and out the door she ran. Just after she began her 14-mile commute home, the tornado dropped from the clouds and began its march toward Moore. Listening to the weather reports in the car, Long knew she probably wouldn’t beat the storm, and she called Alyson and told her to get out of the house and head south.
Now, driving in the heavy rain toward Norman, it was Alyson’s turn to worry. According to the radio, the tornado was cutting down 149th Street, the route her mother sometimes took to get home from work. She tried calling her mom again and again but couldn’t get through. She began to panic. Finally, after another attempt, her mother answered, but Alyson could barely understand what she was saying. It sounded like she was saying she was driving down Interstate 44 toward home. But that made no sense to Alyson because that would place her mother directly in the path of the storm, and she wouldn’t take a risk like that. But before she could ask her to explain, the call abruptly cut out.
• • •
At KOCO Damon Lane briefly stepped off camera and again he texted his wife, Melissa. It had been nearly half an hour since she’d told him she was leaving work, and she still hadn’t responded to his last message. On radar the tornado was on 149th Street in Oklahoma City. But as it tracked toward Moore, it appeared to be moving a little bit to the northeast, putting it on a path that would take it right to his house, a few blocks south of Fourth Street on the east side of town. His heart began to beat even faster. Could this really be happening?
When Lane had moved to Moore four years ago, right after taking the job at Channel 5, he had known better than anyone the city’s history with treacherous weather. He had even studied previous Moore storms, including the 1999 tornado, in meteorology classes at the University of North Carolina. But even now, watching live images of a monster twister taking dead aim at his home, there was a part of him that could not really believe on a personal level what was actually happening. He had always known intellectually that weather was ruthless and anybody was at risk. But now, with his wife, his dogs, and his home seemingly in the path of a killer tornado, Lane suddenly understood in a sick-to-your-stomach, heart-wrenching way how savage and arbitrary this beast really was.
He had never really considered what it might be like to be on air following a storm that was putting his own family at deadly risk. It wasn’t something they taught you at school. But now here he was, and it was happening. It felt at times like an out-of-body experience. But the adrenaline kept him going, and even as he began to list streets and businesses increasingly close to his home, Lane knew he had a responsibility to the tens of thousands of other people who lived in Moore or had family there and were going through the same nightmare he was. He messaged his wife again. “Are u in the shelter?” he wrote. Located in the garage, the underground cubby was brand new, a surprise wedding gift Lane hoped his family would never have to use.
• • •
In the sky south of Moore, KFOR helicopter pilot Jon Welsh was monitoring a tornado that was now wrapped in so much rain and debris it looked like a dark fog of death slowly drifting toward Moore, illuminated only by massive power flashes as it blocked out the afternoon sun. And as he flew, listening to both air traffic control and producers back at the studio, Welsh was frantically texting his wife. Like Lane, he lived in Moore—almost in the same spot, except he was on the north side of Fourth Street and Lane on the south, near Bryant Avenue. When the tornado had hit the ground, Welsh had grabbed his cell phone, which still worked at this altitude, and called his wife, Alison, who was out running errands with their youngest daughter, Maddie. “Is it really that bad?” she’d asked him when he told her the storm was headed toward Moore. She told her husband she was going to go pick up their oldest daughter, Morgan, from school and then head home. But he sensed she didn’t understand how serious the storm was. “You have to get to the shelter now,” he’d emphatically told her, as he watched the vortex rapidly expand in size. “I am not kidding.”
Welsh didn’t hear from his wife after that. He assumed but didn’t know for sure that she’d made it home. Now, as the storm prepared to cross into Moore from Oklahoma City, she wasn’t responding to text messages, which wasn’t like her. It made him nervous. While Lane could see on the radar that his house was in danger, Welsh could physically see from the helicopter that his house was in the bull’s-eye of the storm, and it scared him to death.
As he stood ready to go back on air with Mike Morgan, Welsh took several deep breaths and tried to remain calm, tapping into the military training that had helped him keep his head when he was flying combat missions over war-torn Baghdad. That had been scary, but it was nothing like this. His heart ached as he thought of his young family in the path of a tornado that was heartlessly ripping apart everything in its wake. Describing for KFOR’s audience what he was seeing, Welsh realized his wife might be listening. “It’s going towards the Moore, Warren Theatre area,” Welsh said in a voice that did not betray the panic he was feeling. And then, just as calmly, he stated his worst nightmare in a tone that could be described as nothing less than matter-of-fact. “It’s going right basically towards my house,” he said.
• • •
At Plaza Towers Amy Simpson was still walking the halls, checking on her students and teachers. The wind was howling outside, and she could hear the old building creak around her in response to the pressure of the storm. At that point the power started to go on and off, scaring the kids, who were beginning to cry. The teachers did their best to console them, but even as they put on brave faces and tried to distract their students with songs and stories and anything else that would keep their minds off the storm raging outside, Simpson knew her staff was scared too. They all were. She suddenly thought of all the time she’d spent crouched in the hallway in her tornado position as a kid growing up in Moore. It was a memory she had always associated with fun, getting out of class to hang out in the hallway, where the lights had been shut off to mimic the real scenario of the storm. She’d always had snacks and her favorite stuffed animal. One year she’d even had a tiny flashlight. Even recently, as she’d practiced the drill as a teacher and now as principal, it had never entered her mind to feel any fear: They’d never been in any real danger. How she wished this were just another drill.
Suddenly she felt her iPhone vibrate. It was a text message from her husband, Lindy, who had picked up their kids from school and was at their house a couple of miles to the southeast of Plaza. Scarlet and Roarke were already in a neighbor’s underground storm shelter, but Lindy was nervously pacing the driveway outside, listening to the weather broadcasts and braving the heavy rain and hail to look at the storm toward the west. He feared the worst, and he did not mince words with his wife. “It’s going to hit you,” he wrote. Panic shot through Simpson’s heart, but she willed herself to remain calm, knowing that it was her responsibility to the students and her staff to keep it together even in the face of a nightmare storm that threatened to kill them all.
Rushing back to her office, she passed a side door and saw the back building several yards away where Plaza’s second- and third-grade classes
were held. She paused. Simpson knew many of the kids had been checked out early because she’d seen them dash through the hallway with their mom or dad. But she didn’t know how many kids were left, and she began to worry. She wanted to go to them, to check on them, to make sure they were safe and so that she would know who was there. But as she walked to the door, she could see the sky raining down huge chunks of hail, and she thought of her husband’s message warning her that the storm was coming for them. At this point she didn’t know how far the tornado was from the school. She couldn’t see it. And she worried she wouldn’t have time to make it back to the intercom in her office, where she wanted to be to pass along the final warning when the storm was about to hit. So she turned and kept walking, her pace a little quicker than before, praying that the back building would be safe.
When she reached the front of the school, Simpson saw kids lined up with their parents, who were still rushing last minute to get out of the storm’s way. As hail and heavy rain continued to pelt the ground outside, one little girl began to cry and told her she didn’t want to go because she was too scared. Simpson was scared too, but she didn’t dare show it. In her head she reminded herself to be strong. “No, ma’am,” she told the little girl, as she fluffed up her backpack around her. “You have to go with your mom and dad.” But as she nudged her to the door, Simpson had a second thought and stopped. She grabbed a heavy hardcover textbook off a shelf nearby and told the little girl to use it to cover her head. Simpson began to do the same with other kids as they left the school, doing anything she could to protect their fragile little bodies from the unmerciful storm outside. Soon the shelf was bare.
For a moment Simpson found herself thinking of her own kids, wishing she’d hugged them a little tighter that morning before school. She would see them again. She didn’t dare let herself think otherwise. We’re going to make it through this, she told herself. She walked back into the hallway, wondering if she had time to make one more lap to check on the students. Outside there seemed to be a lull in the storm, and she could hear the gentle little voices of her kindergartners singing nursery rhymes. They sounded like tiny angels straight from heaven.
A mother and father rushed past Simpson with their kid. She paused, watching them as they raced out the front entrance and ran toward the parking lot. Silently she prayed they would be safe. But suddenly she saw them glance west and stop dead in their tracks. Their faces wrenched in fear, they grabbed their child and quickly ran back toward the school. Simpson’s stomach dropped as she felt panic seize her body. At that very moment she knew the nightmare was real: The tornado was on their doorstep. She didn’t even wait to hear what the parents would say before turning and rushing back into her office. Around her the lights began to flicker again, and she prayed the power would stay on long enough for her to get on the intercom one last time. She lifted the receiver, and in a voice that was so calm she couldn’t believe it was coming from her body, she said the words that she had dreaded since the moment she had heard the storm sirens wail almost a half hour before.
“It’s here,” she said, and in the distance she could hear the tornado’s roar.
CHAPTER 12
3:15 P.M., MAY 20
Lando Hite was inside one of the barns at Celestial Acres, a horse-training facility on the grounds of the 160-acre Orr Family Farm just off 149th Street and Western Avenue, when he noticed the horses were starting to act a little spooked. Outside the wind was picking up, but Hite, a twenty-four-year-old Oklahoma native, didn’t think much of it. There had been bad weather the day before and the day before that. It was a typical spring day in Oklahoma and he was used to the afternoon storms, even if the horses weren’t.
Tall and skinny with a gentle drawl, Hite was a self-described cowboy, or at least that’s what he said when people asked him what he did for a living. He slept on a bunk inside a tiny tack room at the farm, where he worked as a caretaker and exercise rider for more than a dozen Thoroughbred racehorses. As they often were at this time of year, the stables were almost full—packed with some sixty-five other Thoroughbreds and quarter horses in town to compete in the spring races at Remington Park, on the north side of Oklahoma City.
There were no meets that Monday, and Hite spent the day as he usually did, grooming and riding the horses around Celestial Acres’ training track. It sat alongside the agriculture theme park operated by the Orr family, which featured pony rides and a petting zoo full of chickens, pigs, rabbits, goats, and sheep. The farm was a popular place in May, often crawling with kids on their end-of-the-school-year field trips, but it was quiet on this Monday as a result of the ominous skies. Soon enough the heavens opened up, pounding the barns with heavy rain, large hail, and blistering winds as loud claps of thunder shook the ground like tiny earthquakes.
Hite stayed inside with the horses until he noticed that the storm had suddenly let up. Walking out into the yard to enjoy the reprieve, he immediately sensed that something was off. It was strangely quiet. There were no birds chirping, no sound of traffic, just an eerie stillness. That’s when he glanced toward the west and saw it in the distance: an angry black vortex on the ground no more than a mile away heading down 149th Street straight for him. He had never seen a tornado before, only on television or in the movies. He stood frozen for a second wondering what to do, until he was hit by a straight-on wind gust that almost blew him to the ground.
Hearing a horse neighing behind him, he booked it back to the stables and began freeing all the animals he could, running from building to building as he herded them from their stalls toward the open pasture behind the farm. He hoped that allowing the horses to run free might give them a better chance of surviving the monster tornado than they would have penned up in buildings that already seemed to be swaying in the terrible winds. By now the funnel was bearing down on the farm like a freight train, and it suddenly seemed he was living out a scene from Twister. Branches and pieces of boards began to fly past him like deadly stakes, and as the tornado got closer, he saw entire roofs of houses floating in the sky almost in slow motion, seemingly as weightless as feathers. As the horses ran frantically in the nearby field, Hite began to wonder if this was it for him. He had no idea where to take shelter. Everybody on the farm seemed to have vanished. It was just him and the horses.
With the tornado now just a few hundred yards away, Hite saw what looked to be a horse suddenly lifted in the air in the distance. He did the only thing he thought might save his life: He raced back to one of the barns, ran inside, and dove into a horse stall. He barely had time to cover his head before the storm was upon him, a roaring, swirling devil that consumed the building around him in seconds. Hite had never heard anything so loud in his life, and as he clutched a beam, he felt his ears popping as the storm began to suck at his body, tearing off his shoes and his shirt. The building collapsed in a heap of boards and mangled aluminum, and he felt himself beginning to tumble over and over, as if he were in a blender full of wood. It seemed to last forever. Suddenly he felt himself falling, buried by debris that seemed determined to drive him deeper and deeper into the muddy, wet ground. It was as if the storm were intent on literally digging his grave. There was no way he was going to survive this, just no way, he thought, as he felt his body being drilled deeper into the earth. And then, suddenly, it stopped.
• • •
A few blocks away at Briarwood Elementary, LaDonna Cobb saw her husband, Steve, rush through the side door leading into the interior hallway where she and her pre-K class were taking shelter in the main building. He had been outside looking at the storm. She was certain he was going to try once again to persuade her to leave with their daughters, who were taking shelter with their classmates, and flee the tornado, and the word “no” was forming on the tip of her tongue when she suddenly froze at the sight of his face. He wore a look she had never seen before in the more than fifteen years they had been together, something that was beyond fear. “Get out here now,”
Steve ordered, in a tone that made her stomach drop.
Cobb nervously followed him out the door, and together they walked quickly down the sidewalk toward the side of the building. Outside there seemed to be a brief reprieve from the heavy rain and hail. For a moment Cobb wondered if her prayers had been answered and the storm was going to miss them. But then she peered around the corner of the building, and there it was: a towering black funnel so close and so huge it seemed to eat up the entire western sky. It was at least half a mile away, but even so she could see entire trees and houses swirling in the air around it. A building in the distance took a direct hit, and she saw it explode into splinters. She gasped, and her heart seemed to stop. It was too late to run. Briarwood was going to take a direct hit.
In a panic, Cobb and her husband turned and raced toward the first door they found, banging to be let in. It happened to be the outdoor entrance to their daughter Erin’s first-grade classroom, and inside the kids were gathered along an interior wall, crouched on their knees with their heads bowed to the floor. When the teacher let them in, Cobb rushed toward her youngest, dropped to the ground, and used her slender body to cover her and as many of her classmates as she could, gathering them underneath her in a tight embrace. She was determined to be a human shield between their tiny bodies and the horrible, ruthless storm that was coming for them. There was nothing to protect her, nothing to bear the weight of something crashing on her body as the storm hit, but she didn’t care. Like so many of her colleagues at Briarwood, all she could think about were the kids, their young lives barely started and now in such great danger. As the power suddenly went out, leaving them in the dark, the kids beneath her began to cry and shake in fear. “It’s going to be okay,” she said in a shaky voice, not really sure if she was telling the truth.
