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In Moore, a Day for Salvaging, Mourning and Considering the Future
(about 7 hours later)
MOORE, Okla. — With the authorities saying they have likely recovered all the bodies to be found beneath the rubble left by this week’s giant tornado, the focus here on Wednesday turned to the long and expensive path of recovering from one of the most catastrophic storms in Oklahoma’s history.
MOORE, Okla. — Two days after a huge tornado barreled through this working-class town, authorities reopened the worst-hit neighborhoods for the first time on Wednesday, giving residents a few hours to search for wedding rings, retrieve abandoned pets and pry apart a briar patch of rubble to see what had survived and what had not.
“The big need now is debris removal,” Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said at a news conference on Wednesday. “We want to make this as smooth a process as possible, even though we know a lot of people are hurting.”
At 3 p.m. the police and military members who had been barricading the streets stepped aside to allow scores of people back into their wrecked neighborhoods. Some went in on foot, pulling their children in red wagons. Some drove pickups loaded with equipment. People carried tarps and tubs, crowbars and chain saws and anything else that could help them sift through the heaps of what had once been their houses.
All but four of the 24 people killed by Monday’s Category 5 tornado were from Moore, a suburb 11 miles south of Oklahoma City. On Wednesday, survivors continued to return to wrecked places that before Monday afternoon were thriving neighborhoods with schools and churches and playgrounds.
Most had been home during the twister or its immediate aftermath, and knew what to expect. Others had been on vacation or out of town when the tornado struck on Monday afternoon, and had been allowed back for only enough time to grab a bottle of pills or snap a cellphone photo.
For many, all that is left are hunks of broken concrete and brick, lumps of twisted metal, and splintered wooden boards that 200-mile-an-hour winds arranged in scattered piles in what had been backyards.
On Wednesday, they got the full picture. Brick walls lay in heaps. A sports car rested belly-up in someone’s living room. Beds and couches lay shredded like wisps of cotton. Some homes seemed to have been wiped clean off their foundations. Plaza Towers Elementary School, where seven students died, looked as if it had been hit by a bomb.
Power was still out and severed electrical lines snaked through streets and sidewalks.
“All you can say is it’s a complete disaster,” said Doug Stills, 73, a longtime Moore resident whose son’s home was flattened.
“I am no stranger to disaster,” said Gail J. McGovern, president and chief executive of the American Red Cross, which is providing survivors food, shelter and mental health care. “But this is a rough one.”
With search efforts winding down and officials saying that they did not expect to find any more bodies in the rubble, Wednesday’s homecoming marked a first step in the long and expensive process of rebuilding Moore after yet another deadly tornado. Officials said the storm had caused as much as $2 billion in damage, pummeling 12,000 homes and affecting 33,000 people.
“People are really hurting,” Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security, said at a news conference here with local officials. “There’s a lot of recovery to do.” President Obama plans to tour the damaged areas on Sunday.
Mountains of debris litter the town. Although the water has come back, electricity is still out across much of Moore, and severed power lines snake through streets and sidewalks. Most businesses are still closed, and people who work in Moore said they were worried about how they would draw a paycheck in the months ahead.
While most of those left homeless have been staying with family and friends, or in shelters, the most determined have pitched tents amid the devastation to make sure nothing else is taken away from them.
While most of those left homeless have been staying with family and friends, or in shelters, the most determined have pitched tents amid the devastation to make sure nothing else is taken away from them.
Search and rescue crews had finished combing through Plaza Towers Elementary, the crumpled school where seven students died, without finding anyone else buried in the wreckage. Gary Bird, the city’s fire chief, said Wednesday morning that after a group of emergency personnel finished re-examining a small section of town, the authorities would formally conclude the rescue effort.
On Wednesday, under a coppery sky, the town began to clean up. Hundreds of residents and volunteers from across the state gathered to rake the debris from cemeteries and public parks. They swept out the driveways of neighbors and total strangers, handed out free water and hot meals and began pondering whether to rebuild or move on.
“We have been through every damaged vehicle, structure, house, three times,” he said.
As she surveyed the rubble of her home of three decades, Nadine Jones said she could never repair what had been lost. At age 83, she said, she would try to salvage what she could — a gold-framed baby photograph of herself, a stuffed panda bear — and move into an apartment.
Also on Wednesday morning, the Oklahoma City Medical Examiner’s Office released the names of 16 of the 24 victims. The remaining eight names will be released once their next of kin are notified.
“It is a lot of tears,” she said.
The victims include 10 children — one more than the authorities have previously disclosed. One of the children was only 4 months old and another was 7 months old, according to data. The cause of death in almost every case was either blunt force trauma or asphyxia, according to the medical examiner’s office.
Amid the cleanup, families across the area were planning funerals and grieving for the 24 people killed in the storm.
At the end of the day on Monday, on the last week of the school year, students at Plaza Towers were zipping their backpacks. A fifth-grade class had just finished watching a movie about a boy who survives a crash-landing in the Canadian wilderness.
On Wednesday, the Oklahoma medical examiner’s office identified most of the victims and said that 10 of them were children, one more than had been previously reported. The cause of death in almost every case was either blunt force trauma or asphyxia.
Then the sirens started to wail.
To residents, the number of children on the list was heartbreaking. There was Christopher Legg, 9, who loved football so much that he played on two teams — the Rough Riders and the Red Eagles. He had suffered from melanoma and Osgood-Schlatter disease, which caused a painful limp. But his family said Christopher, a third grader, faced the diseases with strength and optimism.
Claire Gossett’s teacher hurried the class into the hallway, then into a bathroom as a tornado that was more than a mile wide drew closer. Claire, 11, crammed into a stall with six other girls. They held onto each other. The sirens wailed two, three, four times.
“He was a very outgoing kid, always willing to help out,” Brian Trumbly, a cousin, said in an interview. “He loved his parents very much.”
Echo Mackey, crouched in a hallway with her son, Logan, recalled, “I heard someone say, ‘It’s about to hit us,’ and then the power went out.”
The family’s home was also destroyed in the storm.
The mountain of rubble that was once Plaza Towers Elementary School has become the emotional and physical focal point of the disaster.
Christopher was one of the seven children killed inside Plaza Towers Elementary. There was also Janae Hornsby, 9, who was described by her family’s pastor as a “beautiful little girl” who made people feel happy just to know her. There was 9-year-old Emily Conatzer, whose mother, Kristi, posted a Facebook message saying she had hoped she would wake up Wednesday to see Emily jumping around and giggling. And there was Kyle Davis, 8, who played soccer and went to monster-truck shows.
Throughout the 500-student school, teachers and parents had shielded students and crammed into closets and anywhere else they could squeeze as the tornado bore down. Then school windows were smashed and the ceiling ripped away, showering the students with glass, wood and pieces of insulation. “I couldn’t hear anything but people screaming and crying,” Claire said. “It felt like the school was just flying.”
The other children killed in the storm were identified as Case Futrell, 4 months old; Sydnee Vargyas, 7 months old; Karrina Vargyas, 4; Antonia Candelaria, 9; Sydney Angle, 9 and Nicolas McCabe, 9.
The tornado swirled out of a fast-developing storm that began cutting a destructive path through Moore and other sections of the southern Oklahoma City suburbs on Monday about 2:45 p.m. It plowed through 17 miles of ground over 50 minutes, damaging or destroying hundreds of homes, businesses, schools and hospitals in Moore and in Oklahoma City itself.
On Wednesday afternoon, Athena Delgado paused as she walked past the crumbled school. Her son Xavier had been trapped inside on Monday, and six of his classmates had died. Xavier, his hands sheathed in floppy gloves to dig through the rubble of his family’s home, ran down the street, laughing. He paused for a moment to look at the school.
Severe weather has become an almost routine part of life in Oklahoma City and its suburbs, a section of Middle America where the lore of twisters and thunderstorms has long been embraced and at times even celebrated. But the 1.3-mile-wide tornado that struck Plaza Towers on Monday stunned Oklahomans, in both its size and the number of victims.
“He says he’s fine,” Ms. Delgado said, looking at her son, “but it’ll hit him.”
On Tuesday, state officials lowered the death toll to at least 24, down from their estimate late Monday night of nearly 100. One reason for the uncertainty was that officials believed that some bodies might have been taken to local funeral homes instead of the state medical examiner’s office, which was doing the official count. But it appeared that the 48 people who were believed to be missing on Monday night — and were feared dead — had been found. More than 200 were injured, including 70 children.
Jack
Healy reported from Moore, and Emma G. Fitzsimmons from New York.
Parents and residents questioned whether Plaza Towers Elementary — a 47-year-old public school whose students range from pre-kindergartners to sixth graders — was the safest place for the children to seek shelter.
Albert Ashwood, director of the State Department of Emergency Management, said the two schools that were hard hit — Plaza Towers in Moore and Briarwood Elementary in Oklahoma City — did not have safe rooms because the appropriate state financing had not been sought. The presence of safe rooms, he said, did “not necessarily” mean that more students would have survived, but it is a “mitigating” factor. “This was a very unique tornado,” he said.
Despite being in a region prone to tornadoes — and being heavily damaged by one in 1999 — the Web site for Moore, population 55,000, says the city has no ordinance requiring storm safe rooms in public or private buildings. The city also lacks a community shelter. Plaza Towers had no underground shelter. A state lawmaker whose district includes Moore, Representative Mark McBride, said the deaths should force an examination of whether schools in Oklahoma should be required to have storm shelters.
Susan Pierce, the superintendent of the Moore school district, told reporters at the news conference on Tuesday that safety was the district’s top priority. School administrators and staff members put a crisis plan into action on Monday and monitored the weather throughout the day, she said. “With very little notice we implemented our tornado shelter procedures at every school site,” she said.
Ms. Pierce said the state requires schools to perform tornado drills, and the district has exceeded that requirement. “We’re in the process of learning as much as we can about what has happened, and we are reviewing our emergency procedures today,” she said.
Ms. Mackey, the parent who crouched in the hall as the tornado struck, said she had gone to Plaza Towers as the sky turned dark, saying she had wanted to be with her son when the storm hit. She concluded that the school was not equipped to shelter dozens of children from the raw power of an Oklahoma twister.
“There’s no question in my mind that that school was not safe enough,” she said.
Late Monday afternoon, as the skies darkened, numerous parents rushed to the school. Some decided to seek shelter with their children. Others had enough time to flee, which may have prevented more casualties.
Jennifer Doan, a Plaza Towers teacher who is eight weeks pregnant, waited anxiously in a hallway with 11 of her third-grade students who had not yet been picked up by their parents. An announcement blared over the intercom that the tornado was upon them, and Ms. Doan, 30, quickly wrapped several of her students in her arms. The walls suddenly caved in, she told her boyfriend, Nyle Rogers.
Ms. Doan was conscious, buried under piles of rubble, but she was not sure her students were safe. She thought she could make out their movement beneath the debris. “She kept telling them to hang on,” Mr. Rogers said.
In the distance she could hear their voices: “I can’t hold the rock anymore,” one said. Eventually the voices stopped.
Mr. Rogers had gone speeding toward the school when he had gotten word of the tornado. “As I got closer, I saw debris and backpacks,” he said. “And when I turned the corner, I just saw a wasteland. I didn’t know how anyone could have survived.”
But Ms. Doan did. She was lifted out of the rubble, put in the back of a pickup truck and shuttled to a nearby church and then to the hospital, where she was in stable condition on Tuesday with a fractured sternum and spine. A piece of rebar speared her left hand.
On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Rogers said he was informed by the principal that seven of the students in the hallway had died. He had not yet told Ms. Doan.
“She’s just worried about her kids,” he said. “That’s all she’s thinking about right now.”
But the principal told him something else. Two of the students she had wrapped in her arms had survived.
Reporting was contributed by John Eligon from Moore; Dan Frosch from Denver; Michael Schwirtz, Timothy Williams and Christine Hauser from New York; and Ben Fenwick from Norman, Okla.
