Oklahoma Tornado: Multiple People Killed as Mile-Wide Storm hits Moore
Path of the EF-5 tornado through Moore, Oklahoma.
The Guardian UK, 21 May 2013
Oklahoma City suburb of Moore flattened by mile-wide tornado, with TV footage showing schools and homes reduced to rubble
Oklahoma governor says 237 people injured in tornado – as it happened
Overturned cars are seen after a massive tornado touched down near Oklahoma City. Photograph: Reuters
• Officials revise down death toll to 24,
with the death toll expected to rise
• Search and rescue effort winds down
• 9 children among dead in Moore, Oklahoma
• Flattened schools lacked 'safe rooms'
• Obama declares major disaster amid widespread damage
A boy is pulled from beneath a collapsed wall at the Plaza Towers Elementary School following a tornado in Moore, Okla., Monday, May 20, 2013. Photograph: Sue Ogrocki/AP
The Oklahoma medical examiner's office said it has not yet received the latest 40 bodies to have been retrieved from the rubble in Moore, but had been told by emergency services to expect them, an official has said.
The ferocious storm – less than 1% of all tornados reach such wind speeds – ripped through the suburb of Moore on Monday in a mid-west region of the US known as tornado alley.
The storm laid waste to scores of buildings in the community of 41,000 people about 10 miles south of Oklahoma City. Block after block lay in ruins. Homes were crushed into piles of broken wood. Cars and trucks were left crumpled on the roadside. Rescuers launched a desperate rescue effort at the Plaza Towers school, pulling children from heaps of debris and carrying them to a triage centre.
Path of the tornado through Moore, Oklahoma.
The National Weather Service estimated that the tornado was an EF-5 on the enhanced five-point Fujita scale, the second most powerful type of twister.
More than 120 people were being treated at hospitals, including about 50 children as the search-and-rescue efforts continued throughout the night.
A woman carries a child through a field near the collapsed Plaza Towers elementary school. Photograph: Sue Ogrocki/AP
In the videos a dark funnel cloud could be seen marching slowly across the green landscape. As it churned through the community, the twister scattered shards of wood, awnings and glass all over the streets.
A grab provided by KWTV. Photograph: KWTV/AP
The Oklahoma governor, Mary Fallin, deployed National Guard members to assist with rescue operations and activated extra highway patrol officers.
Fallin also spoke to President Barack Obama, who declared a major disaster and ordered federal aid to supplement state and local recovery efforts.
"Hearts are broken" for parents looking for their children, Fallin told a news conference.
At the school, the storm tore off the roof, knocked down walls and turned the playground into a mass of twisted plastic and metal.
Children from the school were among the dead, but several students were pulled alive from the rubble. Rescue workers passed the survivors down a human chain to the triage centre in the car park.
James Rushing, who lives across the street from the school, heard reports of the approaching twister and ran to the school, where his five-year-old foster son, Aiden, attends classes. Rushing believed he would be safer there.
"About two minutes after I got there, the school started coming apart," he said.
The students were sent into the bathroom.
A man with a megaphone stood near a Catholic church on Monday evening and called out the names of surviving children. Parents waited nearby, hoping to hear their sons' and daughters' names.
As dusk began to fall, heavy equipment was rolled up to the school, and emergency workers wearing yellow crawled among the ruins, searching for survivors.
Rescuers work to free people trapped in the rubble. Photograph: Sue Ogrocki/AP
Crews used jackhammers and sledgehammers to tear away concrete, and chunks were being thrown to the side as the workers dug.
Many telephone lines to stricken areas were down, and mobile phone networks were congested. The storm was so massive that it will take time to establish communications between rescuers and state officials, the governor said.
Tiffany Thronesberry said she heard from her mother, Barbara Jarrell, shortly after the tornado struck.
"I got a phone call from her screaming, 'Help! Help! I can't breathe. My house is on top of me!'" Thronesberry said.
She hurried to her mother's house, where first responders had already pulled Jarrell out. She was taken to hospital for treatment of cuts and bruises.
The tornado also destroyed the city hospital and numerous businesses. The mayor of Moore, Glenn Lewis, said he watched it pass through from his jewellery shop. "All of my employees were in the vault."
He said the cleanup had already started and city workers were already at work printing new street signs to replace those that blew away.
Chris Calvert saw the tornado from about a mile away.
"I was close enough to hear it," he said. "It was just a low roar, and you could see the debris, like pieces of shingles and insulation and stuff like that, rotating around it."
Even though his neighbourhood is a mile from the tornado's path, it was still covered with debris. He found a picture of a small girl on Santa Claus's lap in his yard.
A map provided by the National Weather Service showed that the storm began west of Newcastle and crossed the Canadian river into Oklahoma City's rural far south-western side about 3pm local time. When it reached Moore, the twister cut a path through the centre of town before lifting back into the sky at Lake Stanley Draper.
Oklahoma City police captain Dexter Nelson said downed power lines and open gas lines posed a risk in the aftermath of the storm.
The tornado loosely followed the same path of a killer twister that hit Moore in May 1999. That storm produced the highest winds ever recorded near the Earth's surface – 302 mph.
Kelsey Angle, a weather service meteorologist in Kansas City, Missouri, said it was unusual for two such powerful tornadoes to track roughly the same path.
It was the fourth tornado to hit Moore since 1998. A twister also struck in 2003.
Oklahoma City has had more tornado strikes than any other city in the U.S, the city government's website says.
Monday's devastation in Oklahoma came almost exactly two years after an enormous twister ripped through the city of Joplin, Missouri, killing 158 people and injuring hundreds more. On Monday, Joplin organised a team of about a dozen police and firefighters to assist in Moore.
Link to Videos: Oklahoma Tornado Devastates Moore
Second EF-5 Tornado for Moore, Oklahoma
Both the 1999 and 2013 tornadoes followed virtually the same path through the Oklahoma town.
ABC, 21/05/2013
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