The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado

by Holly Bailey

  Lane’s heart sank. Judging just by the radar, the tornado grinding through Moore was the most dangerous storm he’d seen since he’d started working in television. He was horrified by the ominous live pictures that were coming in of the storm as his chasers raced to the east to stay ahead of it. Even over their scratchy cell-phone connections he could hear the roar of the storm—and they were at least half a mile to a mile ahead of it. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what it was like to be in the epicenter of that horrible swirling devil. It wasn’t just conjecture when he warned people in the path of the storm to get below ground. Lane increasingly didn’t see how anyone in the path of the storm could survive it—much less his dog, who was like a child to him. As the radar updated again, the tornado had moved ever so slightly to the north, putting it on track to go right over his home. Typing as fast as he could so he could jump back on camera, Lane begged his wife to try one more time to save their dog. “He’s going to die,” he wrote, warning her that the storm was coming but she still had time. “Put on gloves,” Lane pleaded. “Please save Skylar! I don’t want him to die.”

  Over Channel 5’s airwaves, storm chaser Chance Coldiron was streaming live video of the tornado. It was a dark and ominous wall of debris as it approached his position at Santa Fe Avenue and SW Fourth Street in Moore. He was just northeast of Briarwood Elementary and only a few blocks away from Plaza Towers. “There’s a neighborhood addition here about to take a direct hit,” Coldiron called out, unable to disguise the alarm in his voice. Lane felt sick. He walked back on camera and stood before the green screen that projected the image of the storm on the Doppler radar. It was now rotating over Moore like a massive hurricane. And as he opened his mouth to speak, his voice was different from before. There was an edge that hadn’t been there minutes earlier, an audible tinge of anxiety that Lane had tried to keep in check but that had snuck out. Keep it together, Lane, he told himself. Keep it together.

  • • •

  Back in Moore, Robert Romines was caught in a heavy, driving rain as he raced south and then west to get around the massive storm. He was still trying to get to his daughter’s school at 149th Street and May, which he feared had been hit by the tornado. His calls and texts to the staff at Wayland Bonds Elementary weren’t going through, and none of his colleagues had been able to reach them either. He prayed it was just the storm interrupting the cellular airwaves and not something worse. Oh God, why is this happening? Romines thought. How can this be happening?

  By now the truck he was driving was being dinged by huge chunks of hail, but Romines could barely hear it over the heavy beating of his own heart. The rain and wind were so fierce he could barely see out the windshield. He had the steering wheel in a death grip, grabbing it so tight his knuckles were white. He knew he was probably driving like a maniac, weaving around cars and taking side roads to dodge traffic and find a way around the storm, but he didn’t care. Nothing was going to stop him from getting to that school. In the passenger seat his colleague Jeff Horn tried again to call Michelle McNear, the principal at Wayland Bonds. All circuits were busy. Romines began to feel as if he couldn’t breathe.

  Romines wasn’t unfamiliar with driving in storms. It was such a normal occurrence it probably should have been a part of the driving test in Oklahoma, but he had a few more skills than most in the art of navigating the weather. In fact, Romines was a proud weather junkie, and ever since he was a kid he had lived for the springtime in Oklahoma, when the biggest storms of the year would roll through. He had been storm chasing before storm chasing was cool, practically since the moment he’d gotten his license at the age of sixteen. Back then his parents had admonished him to stay away from storms, warning him that the weather could turn on you in an instant. And in the most convincing voice possible, he’d promised he would. But then, under the pretense of heading to a friend’s house, he’d secretly drive out west and watch the storms rise up and explode along the vast, open farmland. It was something he continued to do well into adulthood. “Be right back,” he’d tell his wife, Traci, and off he’d go. She never seemed to mind. It was who he was.

  As for others who had grown up in Tornado Alley, storms had an allure for him that he couldn’t quite explain, an attraction that couldn’t be put into words. It wasn’t something he’d ever had to articulate. People here instinctively understood the appeal of stormy weather because most of them felt that way too. It was as if it were somehow ingrained in the collective DNA of an entire region to love thunderstorms and want to be near them.

  Romines found something undeniably beautiful about the way the clouds drew up toward the heavens and turned the day as black as night, the way streaks of lightning shot across the sky and zipped toward the ground in unpredictable ways. He was drawn to the ominous clap of thunder, to that odd mix of fear and anticipation that it stirred up deep within him as he wondered what was to come. He found the smell of a coming thunderstorm intoxicating, that luxurious aroma of rain right before it began to fall. It was his favorite smell in the world.

  Every so often he’d seen a funnel cloud emerge, slinking to the ground like a tempestuous belly dancer on a mission to seduce and destroy the land below. He couldn’t look away. He was drawn to it like a snake to a charmer—though he knew full well that the vortex had the ability to strike and kill and that he, as a mere mortal, would be powerless against it. In 1999 he’d been out of town at an education conference when news broke that Moore had been hit. He’d spent hours trying to reach his wife and family in a city where the lines of communication had been wiped out. He’d been luckier than most that day. Hours later he learned that his family was okay, but as he’d watched other storms form and dissipate since then, he’d thought of that terrible, sick feeling on May 3 as he wondered about the fate of the people he loved. Still he couldn’t bring himself to look away. Tornadoes fascinated him.

  Now, as he cut a jagged path toward the west side of town, speeding past cars whose drivers had stopped to gawk at the storm, Romines briefly wondered if he wasn’t being punished somehow for how much he loved wild weather. How could he have found beauty in something that was so destructive?

  On the radio he heard the voice of Gary England, the man who had guided him through so many storms before. He could hear the alarm in England’s voice. The storm wasn’t letting up. It was only getting stronger. It was now on 149th Street approaching Santa Fe Avenue, England said. Romines’s heart sank. That was where Briarwood Elementary was. And to the east of that was Plaza Towers, led by Amy Simpson, whom he’d known since childhood. “This is a critical situation,” England continued, the unease in his voice echoing ominously through the car. “Take your tornado precautions. . . . Get below ground, if you can.” But Romines knew the kids couldn’t. In those old buildings there was nowhere to go but the hallways, closets, and bathrooms. He prayed they would be enough.

  As Romines turned west, the rain suddenly let up and he could see the funnel. It was the biggest, scariest thing he’d ever seen, a mile wide or more as it hovered over the entire mass of land between SW Fourth and Nineteenth Streets ahead of him. He slowed the truck as he and Horn waited to see which way the storm would go to avoid being hit. As they did, his phone let out a ding. It was a text message from the counselor at Wayland Bonds. The school had narrowly escaped a direct hit, and Avery and everyone else were okay. Romines felt relief, but it was fleeting. Looking at where the storm was, he was certain Briarwood had been hit, and Plaza Towers either had been or was about to be. As they watched, the storm seemed to slow down, taking its time to destroy everything in its path.

  Romines inched the car a little farther to the west, as the storm appeared to be heading north of them. As it got closer to Interstate 35, he could see cars being tossed around inside the funnel, picked up like tiny Hot Wheels, the toy cars he had played with as a boy. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. At that moment Romines knew he would never love tornadoes again.

 
CHAPTER 14

  3:18 P.M., MAY 20

  They crowded into the bathtub just as they had practiced only days before, but as the house began to creak and the ground began to shudder, Laurinda Vargyas wondered if it would be enough. Outside the pounding rain and hail had stopped, but she could hear the ghastly roar of the storm. It sounded like a freight train, just as she had always heard people describe it. Vargyas had no idea what to expect. This was her first tornado—the one she had hoped would never come.

  The thirty-year-old mother of four was from Kern County, California, a place where so many Oklahomans had gone to escape the terrible disaster of the Dust Bowl eighty years before. But like many Californians in recent years, she and her husband, Phillip, had done a reverse migration. When he’d retired from the navy in 2010, they had left Ridgecrest, California, for Oklahoma City, where there were more jobs and a better quality of life. Oklahoma’s wild weather had come up as they discussed their future. Could they really live in a place that was so dangerously stormy? But Phil was from Houston—a city regularly pounded by tropical storms that blew in off the Gulf of Mexico—and in California they faced other risks: wildfires and drought and the threat of earthquakes. The Indian Wells Valley, where they lived while Phil worked at the nearby naval base at China Lake, was considered long overdue for “the big one.” A natural disaster, it seemed, could happen anywhere.

  In the end the occasional threat of a tornado was trumped by pure economics. It was simply cheaper to live in Oklahoma, and it hadn’t been hit as hard by the recession as many states. There was a hopefulness, a sense that things were getting better, that you didn’t find in central California. Phil quickly found a job as an IT manager in Oklahoma City, and the family moved. He made just enough so that they could rent a nice house and Laurinda could stay at home with the kids. They weren’t rich by any means, and some months were tougher than others, but they had a good life. They lived in a comfortable home on 147th Street, just over the Moore city line in a good neighborhood full of families and kids. They were a block away from Briarwood Elementary, where their oldest children—Damon, eleven, and Aria, eight—went to school. Their daughter Karrina, just a few weeks shy of turning five, went to prekindergarten classes there in the morning while Laurinda stayed home with their newest addition, Sydnee, an angelic baby girl who had been born the previous October.

  Sydnee was their “Okie,” as Phil called her, because she was born in Oklahoma. A squirming, laughing little bug of a child, she was the delight of the family—“the happiest baby alive,” according to everyone who met her. Even Karrina, who Phil and Laurinda had worried might be a little jealous, adored her little sister and treated her like her own little doll. They dressed in matching pink and purple—the same hues as Karrina’s beloved Minnie Mouse bedroom set. They looked like tiny princesses, adorned in rainbows and hearts and bright patterns that accentuated their sweet faces. Like Damon and Aria, they had the bright smiles and angelic laughter that made all the sacrifices a parent has to make for their kids worthwhile. Phil and Laurinda doted on their children and would stop at nothing to protect them.

  The Vargyases had been diligent in practicing what to do in case of a tornado, just as they had done fire drills to make sure everyone knew their role. Maybe it was his military background, but Phil strongly believed, and his wife agreed, that it was important to prepare for the worst-case scenarios. So when the storm sirens began to blare, Laurinda grabbed Sydnee and Karrina and hustled toward the bathroom, as they had done in the drills. It was the safest spot in the house, since they didn’t have a storm shelter. She and her mother, LaVisa, who had moved from California to Oklahoma in January to be closer to her daughter and grandkids, used their bodies to shield the little ones. And as they sat in the tub waiting for the worst, Laurinda worried about the fate of her older kids, who were at Briarwood Elementary down the street.

  Karrina was scared, too young to understand a tornado but old enough to know that what was happening wasn’t good. Laurinda and her mother did their best to comfort her, rubbing her back and telling her it was going to be okay. Laurinda didn’t like to see her like this, her sweet little girl who spent hours in the backyard dancing and twirling without a care in the world. The previous fall, just before Sydnee had been born, she and Phil had taken Karrina to see a Disney on Ice show at the annual state fair. And there, as her favorite Disney princesses glided across the ice in front of her, Karrina had turned to her parents and excitedly told them she was going to be a figure skater when she grew up. Her parents didn’t have the money to pay for lessons, but they would someday, Phil had promised. Now all Laurinda wanted was a chance to see her daughter on the ice. It had to happen. Life couldn’t be so cruel as to take that promise away.

  Suddenly, with a thunderous howl, the tornado was upon them. As Laurinda and her mother clutched the tiny little girls and each other, the house began to shake and split apart around them, peeling away piece by piece in the terrible winds. Even over the deafening roar, Laurinda could hear and feel the cracking of wood and glass as her body began to be pummeled with bricks and boards and everything else the storm could throw at her. She squeezed her daughters closer, holding them as tightly as she could, praying the storm would go away. But suddenly, before her mind could even process what was happening, Laurinda was sucked into the air and her two little girls ripped from her grasp. She felt herself airborne, tumbling again and again forward and backward and sideways as her body was beaten and slammed by whatever was in the air around her. She was banged in the head, and something was ripping at her skin, and for a moment it felt like her body might explode from the sudden pressure of the storm. Then, just as suddenly as she had been picked up, the storm ruthlessly spit her out, and she landed with a massive thud on the ground in the middle of a neighborhood that she didn’t recognize. Opening her eyes, she saw only piles of rocks and sticks as far as the eye could see. It was as though she had been transported through some horrifying portal from her quiet neighborhood into a war zone.

  Dazed and bleeding profusely from deep cuts on her head and body, Laurinda tried to sit up against a wall of wind that almost threatened to take her again. The tornado still seemed to be lingering right over her, a massive funnel of cloud and debris that stretched high into the heavens. The air was thick with the remains of the houses that had once stood around her; insulation and boards and other unidentifiable objects pummeled her as she tried to stand up. She began to look around her, scouring the landscape for any sign of her two girls. Over her right shoulder she saw the mangled body of her mother, battered and bloody, her scalp almost ripped off. She looked like she was dead, but as Laurinda crawled to her, she saw that she was still breathing ever so faintly and trying to talk.

  Laurinda struggled to her feet against the winds. Things continued to fly at her as the storm seemed determined to take her down. She grabbed a blanket she found on the ground and covered her mother, hoping she could survive until help came. And then she turned and frantically began looking for her daughters. They had to be nearby. Her mind was muddled, and she sensed she was in shock. She could feel the warm ooze of blood from somewhere, but she was numb to the pain. Where were her girls? Where had the storm taken them?

  That’s when she saw Sydnee in the distance, her tiny seven-month old baby, her little body usually squirming like a happy worm, now lying painfully still on the concrete driveway of a neighbor’s house a few yards away. Laurinda ran to her, dodging lumber and insulation that continued to fly in the air, and as she got closer, she realized her daughter, her baby whose life had barely begun, was dead. Laurinda fell her to knees as she picked up Sydnee’s lifeless little body and held her close.

  Sydnee had only just started to enunciate words, her sweet gurgles and squeals forming little bursts of “Mamas” and “Dadas.” Her first word was “Bubba,” for her brother Damon, who had spent hours cradling her, the protective older brother of a pack of young sisters. To the west Laurinda
could see that Briarwood was nothing but rubble. Were he and Aria gone too? Where was Karrina? Her mind could not seem to focus. It all seemed so unreal. What had happened?

  She held her baby to her chest, rocking her as people slowly began to emerge from the debris and survey the apocalyptic landscape around them. There was a strong smell of natural gas punctuated by the odor of disturbed earth and rain. But Laurinda was aware of none of this. All she could focus on was her still little baby who had crawled for the first time only the day before, right in their living room, which was now gone, along with everything else they had.

  They had been watching the storm coverage the night before—she and Phil and her mom and the kids. Tornadoes had erupted to the east, toward Shawnee, and that’s when Sydnee had begun to coo and shuffle her little body around on the floor. Everybody had stopped to watch, to take in this precious moment that happens only once in a child’s life, and Phil, his face beaming with the same joy he’d felt in watching his other kids take their first steps, had suddenly laughed. Sydnee was definitely their Okie, he’d said with a chuckle. Only an Oklahoma baby would crawl for the first time when there where tornadoes on the ground nearby.

  Now, not even a day later, a tornado had come and cruelly taken Sydnee away. As the deadly funnel continued to grind its way east, all Laurinda could do was sit in the driveway as it began to rain and hold her lifeless little girl and wonder what had happened to her other kids.

  CHAPTER 15

  3:19 P.M., MAY 20

  As the twister prepared to cross from Oklahoma City into Moore, it suddenly slowed to an excruciating crawl, just as it had right before it had charged east from Newcastle some twenty minutes earlier. But this time, instead of mostly empty farmland, the storm hovered over the neighborhood east of Briarwood Elementary, the most densely populated area on its track so far. It seemed to want to take its time as it violently devoured everything within a mile radius, lingering as it chewed up houses and cars and trees and spit them out, only to suck them up and put them through the grinder once again. As it inched forward, it left the landscape behind it virtually unrecognizable.