Many people outside of Oklahoma and Kansas were
confused by the information they saw or heard on the national news concerning
the massive tornado outbreak that occurred here on May 3, 1999. As a local
resident with better — or at least more extensive — information (who stayed up
half the night waiting for the storms to reach us), I want to try and set the
record straight as to what happened that night:
Oklahoma endured a tornado outbreak numbering close to 80 twisters on Monday, May 3, 1999. It was the worst series of tornadic storms here in 50 years. Areas to the southwest of Oklahoma City (including the towns of Chickasaw and Bridge City), and southwestern and southern Oklahoma City (including Del City, Moore and Midwest City) suffered an estimated 1 billion dollars in property damage during the afternoon and evening, including the total or partial destruction of between 7,000-10,000 homes. There were over 600 injuries and nearly 50 deaths, especially from the catastrophic F5 tornado that rolled over Oklahoma City during rush hour. There was also extensive property damage and loss of life in Wichita, Kansas.
The storms continued to spawn funnels as they moved very slowly up I-44 toward Tulsa (100 miles northeast of Oklahoma City). After nightfall, another mile-wide tornado was reported in the countryside west of Stillwater in central Oklahoma, the home of Oklahoma State University. Moving up I-44, the storms produced significant tornadoes at Stroud, Sapulpa, and finally, in west Tulsa across the Arkansas River at midnight. No one in Tulsa got much sleep that night. The west Tulsa tornado — classified as an F1 that caused some property damage including the destruction of several mobile homes — went back up in the clouds when it reached the river, and remained there while the storms passed over the Tulsa area. The river had nothing to do with the tornado dissipating. It was only luck.
We live in what's called Tornado Alley. We have an advanced and frequently-used warning system, and top-notch meteorologists at our local tv stations; we have the best that science and experience have to offer. The National Severe Storms Laboratory is based in Norman, Oklahoma, southeast of Oklahoma City. Considering that 1-2 million people were touched by these storms, the fact that we had less than 50 deaths can be credited to all of the above.
Yet no one can survive an F5 tornado above ground, no matter how reliable or technologically-advanced their local warning system is. In Tulsa, for example, there are relatively few homes with basements due to our high water table (if you have a basement, it floods when it rains). The University of Tulsa opens their buildings with basements during severe weather, and they did so that night. At the highrise retirement community where my own parents had recently moved — located in far southwest Tulsa extremely close to the Tulsa tornado — all of the residents were evacuated to the first floor.
I thought I knew a lot about tornadoes before Monday, May 3, 1999. Why? In May of 1997, in bright sunshine, I watched several tornadoes drop out of clouds between downtown Tulsa and my house, funnels that never reached the ground (see photo above). This was the same storm system that moved south into Texas the next day, forming the F5 that hit Jarrell, Texas, where 27 people perished, including whole families. HBO aired a special program about tornadoes in the summer of 1999 that has astonishing details about the Jarrell, Texas storm. As much as I watch the news, I had never seen video of this particular F5. An experienced storm chaser found the beginnings of the tornado spinning beside a road north of Jarrell. It was white, and looked like a small water spout. It was stationary for 15 minutes before it began to move south. After that, the tornado doubled in size every five minutes. When it reached Jarrell it had become a black monster that covered the entire horizon, and even this man who had seen many tornadoes said the sight of it "stopped my heart." Mine, too, and I only saw it on t.v.
In 1978 one pitch-black spring night, there was a tornado in the air 3 blocks from my house, reported by police who warned us by using their patrol car sirens because they were looking up at it. We had a F2 tornado in east Tulsa in December, 1975 (and another in December, 1982), when our normal tornado season is April-May-June. We had a F4 tornado on the late afternoon of April 24, 1993 — wrapped in rain so that it could not even be seen — that killed several people along I-244 on the northeast side of town. In the blinding rain, howling winds and sudden darkness of this immensely powerful storm, high school kids driving to their proms abandoned their cars and lay in drainage ditches in their formal gowns and tuxedos. All of them survived. At any given time of the year, we live under tornado watches or warnings. In the spring and early summer, we may have several each week.
After May 3, I discovered I didn't know as much as I thought, including:
1. In deep night-time storm conditions when tornadoes are not easily seen, watch the horizon for exploding power lines. That is a tornado.
2. A very popular storm chaser documentary, now a few years old but widely seen on television, created an impression that hiding under overpasses offers safe haven from a tornado. It’s the worst place you can be; in fact, wind velocities increase under an overpass. Several people who were killed in the Oklahoma City area sought shelter beneath concrete overpasses as the F5 approached, including police and Highway Patrol officers who believed they were taking appropriate safety precautions. People were plucked from beneath the overpasses like pieces of straw, including a mother who had time to tell her young son that she loved him before she let go of his hand and was swept away to her death. Of the vehicles parked near the overpasses, there was a van crushed to approximately the size of the coffee table in my living room.
3. There is only one F5 reported in the continental United States per calendar year.
If you'd like to find out more about tornadoes, visit The Tornado Project. This site gives detailed and fascinating information, from safety tips to the tornado statistics of every county in every state dating back through the fifties, harrowing survivor tales, plus the famous Fujita Scale. You will be amazed and humbled.
If you would like to read a recent, excellent sf novel that concerns tornadoes, I highly recommend Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather.
I hope this information has been helpful. Oklahoma City is actually one of the largest cities in the world geographically-speaking, covering something like 600 square miles. Most of it, I assure you, is still there, and they have been, and still are, rebuilding.
There were heart-breaking, hopeful stories in the aftermath of this catastrophe, which you may or may not have heard:
On Thursday afternoon, May 6, a deputy sheriff found a tiny girl, perhaps one year old, lying under a pile of rubble many miles from her home where she'd been blown. He thought she was a doll until he picked her up, when she moved and cried. She was filthy, slathered in mud from head to toe, and no doubt very thirsty, but she survived. The images of her with the deputy will stay with me forever: She clinging tightly to his neck, while he was obviously in shock that he'd found her.
An elderly man in Oklahoma City was sucked into one of the tornadoes and carried 400 yards. He said that while he was constantly pelted by debris during his "ride," it was eerily quiet. All he could hear was a high-pitched whistling. Interviewed from his hospital bed, he said he no longer had the desire to smoke.
On a different note: Some of the children in the more religious communities that were destroyed were told by adults that God wanted this to happen. I wish they hadn't been told that, because these children should not be made to feel guilty, as if perhaps they had done something to make God angry. On the other hand, I did not have to explain to my children that week why our home was destroyed or why our friends and relatives were injured or taken from us. Personally, I think it happened because we live in Tornado Alley, and that it was our turn. And that it will be our turn again someday.
My thanks to everyone who emailed or inquired about myself and my family in the days following one of the most fearsome natural disasters to ever occur in Oklahoma.
Oklahoma endured a tornado outbreak numbering close to 80 twisters on Monday, May 3, 1999. It was the worst series of tornadic storms here in 50 years. Areas to the southwest of Oklahoma City (including the towns of Chickasaw and Bridge City), and southwestern and southern Oklahoma City (including Del City, Moore and Midwest City) suffered an estimated 1 billion dollars in property damage during the afternoon and evening, including the total or partial destruction of between 7,000-10,000 homes. There were over 600 injuries and nearly 50 deaths, especially from the catastrophic F5 tornado that rolled over Oklahoma City during rush hour. There was also extensive property damage and loss of life in Wichita, Kansas.
The storms continued to spawn funnels as they moved very slowly up I-44 toward Tulsa (100 miles northeast of Oklahoma City). After nightfall, another mile-wide tornado was reported in the countryside west of Stillwater in central Oklahoma, the home of Oklahoma State University. Moving up I-44, the storms produced significant tornadoes at Stroud, Sapulpa, and finally, in west Tulsa across the Arkansas River at midnight. No one in Tulsa got much sleep that night. The west Tulsa tornado — classified as an F1 that caused some property damage including the destruction of several mobile homes — went back up in the clouds when it reached the river, and remained there while the storms passed over the Tulsa area. The river had nothing to do with the tornado dissipating. It was only luck.
We live in what's called Tornado Alley. We have an advanced and frequently-used warning system, and top-notch meteorologists at our local tv stations; we have the best that science and experience have to offer. The National Severe Storms Laboratory is based in Norman, Oklahoma, southeast of Oklahoma City. Considering that 1-2 million people were touched by these storms, the fact that we had less than 50 deaths can be credited to all of the above.
Yet no one can survive an F5 tornado above ground, no matter how reliable or technologically-advanced their local warning system is. In Tulsa, for example, there are relatively few homes with basements due to our high water table (if you have a basement, it floods when it rains). The University of Tulsa opens their buildings with basements during severe weather, and they did so that night. At the highrise retirement community where my own parents had recently moved — located in far southwest Tulsa extremely close to the Tulsa tornado — all of the residents were evacuated to the first floor.
I thought I knew a lot about tornadoes before Monday, May 3, 1999. Why? In May of 1997, in bright sunshine, I watched several tornadoes drop out of clouds between downtown Tulsa and my house, funnels that never reached the ground (see photo above). This was the same storm system that moved south into Texas the next day, forming the F5 that hit Jarrell, Texas, where 27 people perished, including whole families. HBO aired a special program about tornadoes in the summer of 1999 that has astonishing details about the Jarrell, Texas storm. As much as I watch the news, I had never seen video of this particular F5. An experienced storm chaser found the beginnings of the tornado spinning beside a road north of Jarrell. It was white, and looked like a small water spout. It was stationary for 15 minutes before it began to move south. After that, the tornado doubled in size every five minutes. When it reached Jarrell it had become a black monster that covered the entire horizon, and even this man who had seen many tornadoes said the sight of it "stopped my heart." Mine, too, and I only saw it on t.v.
In 1978 one pitch-black spring night, there was a tornado in the air 3 blocks from my house, reported by police who warned us by using their patrol car sirens because they were looking up at it. We had a F2 tornado in east Tulsa in December, 1975 (and another in December, 1982), when our normal tornado season is April-May-June. We had a F4 tornado on the late afternoon of April 24, 1993 — wrapped in rain so that it could not even be seen — that killed several people along I-244 on the northeast side of town. In the blinding rain, howling winds and sudden darkness of this immensely powerful storm, high school kids driving to their proms abandoned their cars and lay in drainage ditches in their formal gowns and tuxedos. All of them survived. At any given time of the year, we live under tornado watches or warnings. In the spring and early summer, we may have several each week.
After May 3, I discovered I didn't know as much as I thought, including:
1. In deep night-time storm conditions when tornadoes are not easily seen, watch the horizon for exploding power lines. That is a tornado.
2. A very popular storm chaser documentary, now a few years old but widely seen on television, created an impression that hiding under overpasses offers safe haven from a tornado. It’s the worst place you can be; in fact, wind velocities increase under an overpass. Several people who were killed in the Oklahoma City area sought shelter beneath concrete overpasses as the F5 approached, including police and Highway Patrol officers who believed they were taking appropriate safety precautions. People were plucked from beneath the overpasses like pieces of straw, including a mother who had time to tell her young son that she loved him before she let go of his hand and was swept away to her death. Of the vehicles parked near the overpasses, there was a van crushed to approximately the size of the coffee table in my living room.
3. There is only one F5 reported in the continental United States per calendar year.
If you'd like to find out more about tornadoes, visit The Tornado Project. This site gives detailed and fascinating information, from safety tips to the tornado statistics of every county in every state dating back through the fifties, harrowing survivor tales, plus the famous Fujita Scale. You will be amazed and humbled.
If you would like to read a recent, excellent sf novel that concerns tornadoes, I highly recommend Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather.
I hope this information has been helpful. Oklahoma City is actually one of the largest cities in the world geographically-speaking, covering something like 600 square miles. Most of it, I assure you, is still there, and they have been, and still are, rebuilding.
There were heart-breaking, hopeful stories in the aftermath of this catastrophe, which you may or may not have heard:
On Thursday afternoon, May 6, a deputy sheriff found a tiny girl, perhaps one year old, lying under a pile of rubble many miles from her home where she'd been blown. He thought she was a doll until he picked her up, when she moved and cried. She was filthy, slathered in mud from head to toe, and no doubt very thirsty, but she survived. The images of her with the deputy will stay with me forever: She clinging tightly to his neck, while he was obviously in shock that he'd found her.
An elderly man in Oklahoma City was sucked into one of the tornadoes and carried 400 yards. He said that while he was constantly pelted by debris during his "ride," it was eerily quiet. All he could hear was a high-pitched whistling. Interviewed from his hospital bed, he said he no longer had the desire to smoke.
On a different note: Some of the children in the more religious communities that were destroyed were told by adults that God wanted this to happen. I wish they hadn't been told that, because these children should not be made to feel guilty, as if perhaps they had done something to make God angry. On the other hand, I did not have to explain to my children that week why our home was destroyed or why our friends and relatives were injured or taken from us. Personally, I think it happened because we live in Tornado Alley, and that it was our turn. And that it will be our turn again someday.
My thanks to everyone who emailed or inquired about myself and my family in the days following one of the most fearsome natural disasters to ever occur in Oklahoma.
via GIPHY
