The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado

by Holly Bailey

  • • •

  Outside, Shelly McMillin, the forty-eight-year-old Moore native who was Briarwood’s principal, was standing on the west side of the campus watching the tornado grow bigger and bigger as it aimed for the school. All she could think of was May 3, a storm she had survived by jumping into a bathtub at her house and pulling a mattress over her head. The television meteorologists had warned people in the path of that tornado that they could not survive unless they were underground. But McMillin had beaten the odds. She had been above ground on May 3 and had lived, even as her home and her neighborhood were blown away around her.

  Now, facing down a tornado that looked every bit as menacing as the one she had encountered fourteen years earlier, McMillin could only think of that miracle. If she’d lived through the most dangerous tornado on record, maybe she and her students and teachers, who had no choice but to ride out the storm in the school, had more of a chance than Mike Morgan and the other guys on television were suggesting. As the storm drew closer, her mind shut off to any scenario other than making it through. We can do this. We’ve got to do this, McMillin thought, a mantra she began to repeat again and again in her head. It was as if someone had physically flipped a switch that shut out the fear and doubt and put her into survival mode. Still, as she ducked back into the building and raced to her office, she began to pray aloud. “Please, God, let it lift,” she pleaded to the heavens above. “Please let it lift.”

  • • •

  In the adjacent buildings teachers and parents were keeping watch through windows and side doors. They could see the sky had turned pitch-black. Startled by how eerily quiet it was, Amy Chase, a sixth-grade teacher, walked back to her classroom to look out a window that faced west. She shrieked as she saw giant chunks of debris flying in the air over the field adjacent to the school and ran as fast as she could back to the hallway. “It’s coming! It’s coming!” she screamed as she ran down the corridor, rushing to get back to her students. She began frantically yelling at the kids to put their backpacks over their heads, but she worried it wouldn’t be enough to protect them from what was coming, especially for the kindergartners who were crouched near her class. Their little bodies were so vulnerable. Growing more hysterical by the minute, Chase noticed a group of parents near the front-office windows and begged them to use their bodies to protect the kids. At first they just looked at her as if they didn’t comprehend what she was saying. “Lay on the babies!” Chase cried. “It’s coming!”

  Suddenly the unmistakable roar of the tornado began to sound in the distance, growing ever closer as students began to scream in horror. Next door, in the building where the fourth- and fifth-grade classes were held, teachers caught a glimpse of the ominous funnel through the back window and began herding students into reinforced restrooms and closets. Like Chase, they were concerned that the hallways wouldn’t be safe enough. On a nearby wall the clock read 3:16 P.M.

  Seconds later something huge hit the roof of the school—cars and farm equipment that had been picked up by the funnel along the way now literally dropped out of the sky like bombs, causing parts of the roof to crack and cave under the pressure. “Hold on, hold on!” Cobb screamed as the building suddenly shook like a bomb. It was the sound of a twelve-thousand-gallon water tank, the size of a tiny submarine and weighing more than ten tons when it was empty, being thrown on top of a third-grade classroom in the next building. As the tank landed, it instantly bent the steel girders holding up the roof almost to floor level inside the classroom below. The entire school seemed to shake on impact. Just inches away, a teacher and her students were taking cover. The tank, and another just like it, had been ripped up like torn pieces of paper from their reinforced-cement bases at the Orr Family Farm and carried more than half a mile by the tornado before falling out of the sky. The other tank landed on a house a few blocks east of Briarwood, crushing it to bits.

  Back in the hallway where Cobb’s pre-K class was taking shelter, the door that led out onto the sidewalk suddenly flew open. Outside was a swirling cyclone of wind and debris with a soundtrack of destruction so loud it drowned out the screams of the teachers, kids, and parents, whose faces were now contorted in absolute terror. Stacey Montgomery, the petite but sturdy teacher, crawled to the door and, struggling against the force of the winds, fought to pull it closed. She wedged her body into a corner and gripped the knob with all the strength she possessed to keep the door shut, her hands shaking and turning white with the pressure.

  As the eye of the storm grew near, the wind began to suck at the door, pulling her almost horizontally in the air as parents, who were forcing their kids’ heads to the ground, watched in horror. Suddenly the door began to lurch outward, dramatically inhaled hinge by hinge by the tornado. As the door vanished, it almost took Montgomery with it, but somehow she clung to something in the hallway and fought her way back down the hall toward the kids. She felt her shoes sucked off one by one, but she kept going, refusing to let the storm take her. Finally back with the kids, she crawled on top of her students and clung to the floor and nearby wall for dear life, screaming at the top of her lungs for God to save their lives and take the storm away.

  As the storm approached Briarwood, it officially became one of the strongest tornadoes captured on record. It was more than a mile wide and its winds were well in excess of 210 miles per hour—this made it an EF5 tornado on the Enhanced Fujita scale, the highest rating a storm can get. The school’s roof began to peel away under the pressure of the winds, and as the storm passed directly over the school, the lightning in the clouds above created an almost strobelike effect inside in the hallways, closets, nooks, and bathrooms where a few hundred students, teachers, and parents were desperately hoping to stay alive. “It’s almost over!” Robin Dziedzic, a fifth-grade teacher, yelled to her students as they rode out the storm in a tiny bathroom. But still the storm raged on, and to some it began to feel as though it would never end.

  • • •

  Squished in a closet in her office with several other administrative staff, McMillin found herself keeping a mental tally of the storm’s progress based on what she had gone through in 1999. She had already heard the grinding of its approach, followed by the loud crash of debris hitting the school. As her ears began to pop, signaling that the tornado was passing almost overhead, she found a strange solace in being able to physically feel the pressure of the storm on her body. I’m still alive, she thought, even as she began to hear the unbearable noise of the building being torn apart all around her.

  In the first-grade classroom where Cobb had hunkered down with her husband and daughter, most of the roof was now gone and she could feel her body being sucked into the air. She clawed at the wall in an effort to gain traction against the storm while at the same struggling to keep her body firmly on top of the children beneath her. If she had to fight to stay grounded against the pull of the tornado, Cobb knew that if the wind were to get to the kids the twister would inhale their tiny frames in an instant. She couldn’t let that happen. “It’s going to be okay! It’s going to be okay!” she screamed, repeating herself as she grabbed at the wall with one hand, trying to brace herself, and shielded the kids, who were now crying out in terror, with the other. She could hear a boy underneath her calling out in anguish for his mother, and her heart ached. Suddenly, before she even realized what was happening, the wall Cobb was trying so hard to cling to collapsed on top of her, a pile of heavy cinder blocks that knocked her sharply in the head and buried her. Everything went black.

  CHAPTER 13

  3:17 P.M., MAY 20

  Even from 2 miles away Glenn Lewis could hear that unmistakable roar, a cross between the sound of a freight train and that of a jet engine. He’d heard it before, watching other tornadoes prey on Moore in the nearly two decades since he was first elected mayor. And every time he had hoped he’d never hear that awful sound again. But he had. Four times now he’d helped rebuild his hometown. Four times
too many.

  Lewis had seen things he had never imagined when he ran for mayor that he would ever see: stunned people crawling out of the rubble of their homes with their bodies impaled by jagged pieces of lumber like giant splinters and other gruesome injuries that looked like what you might expect to find on the front lines of a bloody civil war. These weren’t supposed to be things you saw here on the quiet, suburban streets of Moore, the epitome of small-town America. As he watched yet another tornado grind its way toward the heart of his city, he couldn’t help but stare in disbelief. Was this really happening to Moore again?

  May 3 still haunted the mayor, as it did most people in town who had lived through it. It wasn’t that he went out of his way to think about it. A jeweler by trade who was only supposed to be at City Hall part time but often worked well beyond that, Lewis looked like an adult Big Boy statue come to life, with a round, sweet face that was often lit up with a jovial smile. He was easygoing by nature, known to embrace the bright side of bad situations. That’s how he’d been raised, and even in tough moments he always tried to ease the tension with his deadpan sense of humor. “I ran to clean up Moore, but I didn’t know I’d have to do it piece by piece,” he had joked after the ’99 tornado—a line he’d use again in different variations over the next fourteen years after other bouts of bad weather.

  He was of the opinion that all you could do to get through the tears was try to laugh, pick yourself up, and move on. It was his gentle nature, his ability to be the rock that people could rely on in the most trying of times, that accounted for his having been reelected eight times unopposed since he first became mayor in 1994. Lewis loved Moore and would do anything for its people, and everybody in town knew it.

  Moore had rebuilt after May 3, better than before, just as it had after every single other storm that had hit in the years since. But while the city had moved on, the storm had left invisible scars. By now Lewis was something of an expert on how to deal with the aftermath of a tornado, thanks to the kind of on-the-job training that no public servant anywhere in the world would ever want. When he went to mayoral conferences in other parts of the country—alone, since he didn’t actually have a formal staff, not even a secretary—people always approached him with a look of respect tinged with pity. It bugged him, though he was too nice to say anything. “How do you do it?” the East Coasters often asked, studying him with the curiosity they’d show a martian. “How can you live there?” Lewis would shrug and smile. “We actually have pretty great weather most of the time,” he’d say. They always laughed, even if they looked at him as though he were a bit crazy.

  One bright side to all of this—and Lewis actively looked for it—was that he knew Moore would be ready when the next storm came. And deep down, as much as he wished otherwise, he had always known it would. Now here it was, a giant twister that was bigger than anything he’d ever seen—even the milewide ’99 tornado. And as he stood outside the back door of his jewelry store just south of Nineteenth Street along Interstate 35, it appeared to be coming right at him. Hadn’t Moore already been through enough? Was his city the unluckiest town in America?

  All day he had been looped in on conference calls and e-mails between Steve Eddy, his old high-school friend, and other city employees, and all day, as he often did in the spring, he had hoped that Moore would be spared. Even when the emergency warnings went out alerting everyone that a storm was blowing up to the west of town, he’d prayed that somehow it might go away.

  Though the city had risen again after the May 3 twister, memories of that day lingered, emotional scars that had never really healed. Lewis never forgot what it was like to drive through neighborhoods once so vibrant with life that looked as though they’d been leveled by an atomic bomb. Overnight Moore’s population had dropped precipitously when thousands of people had been forced to relocate, their homes and their entire lives blown away in an instant. Parts of the city resembled a ghost town. The streets didn’t look like streets anymore. It was just rubble as far as the eye could see, and when that was gone, it looked like the surface of the moon—empty and barren. No trees, no houses. Just dust and rocks and empty concrete slabs where homes used to be. It was the worst thing you could ever witness as a mayor, much less as a town son who loved his city too deeply to ever consider moving away. While more than half the people who had been hit came back and rebuilt in Moore, Lewis dreaded the idea of ever seeing anything like that again in his hometown.

  He could still recall as though it were yesterday the odor of natural gas and cut wood and soil mixed with rain that had wafted through the air as the sun set on the most terrible day he had ever known. It had been the smell of every twister since, both large and small, that disturbing perfume of devastation. But on this Monday, as he watched the storm approach from the west, its greenish black clouds spreading across the sky like an ugly bruise, Lewis began to detect that awful aroma in the air around him. It was as if he could actually smell the tornado coming. But maybe it was all in his head. He didn’t know.

  A few feet away, from inside the store, he could hear the sound of the television, which his staff had cranked up to full volume. One of the TV weathermen was imploring people in the path of the storm to immediately take cover. His employees had already heeded the call and were crowded into the store’s giant vault, which doubled as a safe room, squeezed in alongside their stock of intricate diamond engagement rings—“Oklahoma’s largest selection of engagement and bridal rings,” the shop’s ads bragged. But Lewis couldn’t bring himself to go inside. He couldn’t take his eyes off the dark clouds to the west. Even as he began to be pelted by hail and the wind whipped up, blowing the rain sideways, he stood there almost dumbstruck watching the approaching storm. He wished it were just a bad dream, that he would wake up and it would be gone. But as the ground began to vibrate around him from the roar and the motion of the twister, he knew it was all too real.

  Lewis’s cell phone suddenly rang. It was his twenty-nine-year-old daughter, Laura, who had moved away long ago to Washington, D.C., where she worked as an intelligence analyst for the federal government. “Dad,” she told him in a firm voice, “you are about to get hit by a tornado. You need to go inside the vault.” Lewis couldn’t suppress a laugh, even at this horrible moment. How did she know he was standing outside? “What are you guys doing, watching me?” he teased her. But she wasn’t in the mood to joke. “Dad, you need to take cover now,” she scolded. “It’s headed right for you.”

  Lewis hung up the phone, telling his daughter he loved her and promising her he would go to the vault, but as he inched toward the door, he still couldn’t stop staring at the massive twister, so close now that he could see giant chunks of debris flying in the air around it. From KOCO on the television inside he could hear the concerned voice of Damon Lane, a customer who’d come into the store more than a year ago to buy a diamond engagement ring for his future wife. Now the meteorologist was calling out Lewis’s store by name on television, warning that it was in the path of the storm. “Lewis Jewelers,” Lane declared in a stern voice. “You need to be in your tornado shelter immediately.”

  If that wasn’t a sign, Lewis wasn’t sure what was. So he inched toward the back door, stealing one last glance at the storm. It seemed to be more violent than it had been just a few seconds before, tearing away at whole neighborhoods to the west like a rabid dog. And as he took that last look, Lewis heard the storm sirens that had been blaring suddenly go silent. He panicked and quickly called the city’s emergency operations office, which controlled the sirens. “You need to get those sirens back on,” he said, his quiet drawl so well known at City Hall that he didn’t even bother to identify himself. “The tornado is right here.” The woman on the other end of the line was quiet for a second. “They are on,” she told him.

  Lewis paused and tried to make sense of how that could possibly be. And then horror swept over him as he realized what had happened: The tornado had destroyed t
he sirens. It was already in Moore. It was all really happening. He quickly hung up and ran to the vault as the storm drew ever closer.

  • • •

  At KOCO Damon Lane still hadn’t heard from his wife, Melissa, and though he was fighting to remain calm on air, he was beginning to feel more and more panicked. Suddenly, a few feet away, his phone lit up with a message, and Lane quickly tossed the broadcast over to one of his storm chasers in the field while he dashed off camera. To his relief, the message was from Melissa, telling him she’d made it home and was in the shelter. Traffic had been backed up for miles heading south into Moore, in part because of the raging storm ahead of the tornado. She’d only reached the city a few minutes earlier. And as she’d exited Interstate 35 to head east down Fourth Street, she could see the tornado in her rearview mirror looming ominously over the city.

  Melissa, a former morning news anchor who’d moved from Dallas to be with her new husband, was well practiced at the art of remaining calm in times of crisis. It was Television 101. But on that Monday she couldn’t control the fear that raced through her body at the sight of the tornado. She slammed her foot on the car’s accelerator, speeding to get away from the storm, knowing she had only a few minutes at most to get home. Pulling into the driveway, she had barely had time to click open the electric door to the garage before the power went out. Now, as she told Lane by text message, she was in the shelter, but with only one of their dogs. Skylar, their eighty-pound husky, had bitten her when she tried to get him down the stairs of the underground cubby, so she’d locked him inside their pantry instead.