One year after deadly tornado struck, city tries to move on

The big chunks of broken concrete stood out in the tall prairie grass of Glenn Orr’s horse farm.

This was it, Orr said, driving up to the pile of concrete on a golf cart. This was the base that once held a 12,000-gallon water tank.

A year ago, a massive tornado ravaged this farm, picked up the 10-ton steel tank and hurled it half a mile onto the roof of an elementary school.

The mile-wide tornado killed two dozen people, including 10 children, and injured hundreds. As the first anniversary of the May 20, 2013, twister approaches, and as the region tries to move forward, the tank is one of the most enduring symbols of the storm’s deadly force.

The day after the storm, meteorologists and engineers descended on the neighborhoods near the Orr Family Farm in south Oklahoma City and neighboring Moore — some of the most heavily damaged areas in the region — to document the destruction.

Doug Speheger, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Norman, has done damage surveys for two decades. Briarwood Elementary School had been slammed, repeatedly, by cars lofted by the tornado. That wasn’t surprising. What astonished Speheger was the tank.

“At one level, the meteorologist in me is very aware of the power of tornadoes, but there’s a part of me that still can’t believe there is a natural force that strong,” he said.

Speheger began to piece together what happened by interviewing children who were climbing over the remains of their ruined school. The day was warm, so they wore flip-flops as they combed through the debris, looking for backpacks and books. Police officers shooed them away for their safety, and Speheger began to interview them.

When the tornado hit, students in one classroom huddled under desks pushed against the wall. The unreinforced concrete masonry walls toppled, but the desks took the brunt of the force.

The tank, its steel twisted, crashed onto the school roof with a sound like a sonic boom. The tank bent the roof joints to almost floor level in the middle of another classroom where children were lined up against the walls, said Tim Marshall, a meteorologist and structural engineer for Haag Engineering who was on the survey team.

There were no injuries in the classroom hit by the tank. Though Briarwood was destroyed, no one died.

But at nearby Plaza Towers Elementary in Moore, seven third-graders were killed as students and teachers sought shelter in hallways and restrooms. Neither school had a tornado shelter.

A second 10-ton tank from the Orr Family Farm landed in a neighborhood just east of Briarwood, Marshall said.

“It was all intact, which indicated it did not bounce or roll, it simply came out of the sky like a small submarine,” he said. “We see automobiles tossed all the time, but here, you’ve got a 10-ton tank, two of them, lofted. It’s rare to see.”

Survey teams used online maps to locate the tanks’ origin, Marshall said. The tanks were big enough to be clearly be seen in satellite images of the Orr Family Farm.

As time has passed, the scars left by the tornado have become less obvious, but they’re still here.

Both Plaza Towers and Briarwood schools are being rebuilt on their original sites and are expected to be open in August — with tornado shelters in both.

In the neighborhood surrounding Plaza Towers, stars painted by volunteers in the days after the storm, with phrases like “Moore Strong,” are affixed to streetlights. At a nearby Baptist church where hundreds of volunteers gathered last year, a sign reads: “Celebrate Recovery.”

In Moore alone, 1,087 residential homes were destroyed, and hundreds more sustained major damage. As of May 1, the city had received 549 permits to rebuild homes, according to officials. The sounds of construction can be heard throughout the city.

Roger Graham’s red-brick, three-bedroom house had sat at the end of a cul-de-sac on 146th Street in Oklahoma City, less than half a mile east of Briarwood Elementary.

The house was the first home Graham, 33, ever owned. The backyard was so big it took him an hour to push-mow it, and he had to weave around two big pine trees.

Just after the tornado dropped the tanks and leveled Briarwood, it turned Graham’s house into a pile of splintered wood so unrecognizable that he and his wife had to count driveways to determine which plot was theirs. His pine trees were reduced to naked trunks, stripped of branches and bark.

Graham, who wasn’t home during the storm, received a two-word text message from a neighbor that day: “It’s gone.”

Graham and his wife moved to Tulsa weeks after the storm. They sold the property, where a new home, like many in the neighborhood, is under construction.

Nearby, at Orr Family Farm, Glenn Orr smiled as he pointed out the newly built barns, the new fences, the new play area where a group of school children was eating lunch during a field trip. He teared up as he recalled sheltering with his employees, praying as the tornado ravaged the farm. About 70 horses were killed.

From the spot where a tank once stood, he can see the new Briarwood Elementary taking shape.

Orr, 82, remembered getting a call from a police officer shortly after the storm: “Sir, your tank is here.”

“I said, ‘You can keep it,’” Orr said.

Orr doesn’t know exactly what happened to the two water tanks, nor does he care to. He’s moved on.

hailey.branson@latimes.com