70 Miles of Mayhem in 118 Minutes

At 7:31 p.m. CDT Monday, from an office shimmering in the light of Doppler radar and geostationary satellite images, National Weather Service forecaster David Andra hit the “send” key on his computer, flashing the final warning to the residents of Prosperity Acres.

“Urgent Statement: Large, damaging tornado is moving through southern Oklahoma City . . . just to the east of I-35 and the Crossroads Mall . . . people in danger . . . take immediate precautions.”

Relayed instantly to television and radio stations, as well as to police and special weather-band radios, the alert scrolled across the bottom of A.D. and Elsie Fryar’s TV screen in the sprawling, forested neighborhood in the southeast corner of Oklahoma City.

“First they announced over the television that it was south of 89th Street, so we didn’t worry ourselves much,” recalled 87-year-old Elsie Fryar. “Then they said something about it coming our way. Then the television went right off. Then the lights went off. And I said, ‘That’s going to hit us.’ ”

Her husband, 89 and just out of the hospital, had only enough time and strength to tuck his wife of 68 years farther into the corner of their blue-gray sofa and wrap himself around her.

The tornado struck at 7:35 with 250-mph winds and a fury so loud, so terrifying, so unearthly that residents couldn’t decide if the sound was a low-pitched roar or a high-pitched scream.

Thirty seconds later it was gone. Silence was almost all there was.

Fourteen miles to the southeast, inside two brick buildings, scientists at the National Weather Service’s Forecast Center and its Storm Prediction Center tracked the atmospheric giant almost by its changing street address. From the time weather conditions began to look iffy in the dark hours Sunday morning to the moment when the twister lifted back into the sky at Choctaw Monday night, the meteorologists knew almost everything there was to know about the storm. And using a system that instantly trips weather-band radios purchased in bulk around here and that can roll a message across the bottom of a television screen within microseconds, they passed along broad alerts two hours in advance, with neighborhood-by-neighborhood warnings several minutes ahead of the storm.

Still, modern meteorology has limits, its practitioners are quick to point out--limits evidenced by the 41 dead in Oklahoma, a number many consider a near-miracle.

If any event qualifies as an act of God, a tornado does.

The first alert came at 3:30 a.m. Sunday from the Storm Prediction Center.

While the Forecast Center across the parking lot concentrates on the region, the Storm Prediction Center watches over the entire continental United States, taking a longer, broader view of developing weather patterns.

Working in a secluded room packed with double-stacked high-resolution monitors, where a sign once begged: “Will Forecast for Food,” the four scientists pulling night duty noticed the earliest signs of a possible high-altitude collision of air masses.

The swirling blues from two satellites in stationary orbit over the United States and the reds and greens from the nation’s system of 164 Doppler radars hinted at activity along the so-called Dry Line, which runs from the Gulf of Mexico north through western Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.

Dry air from the West was approaching a flow of moist air coming up from the gulf, with strong winds blowing from the south and southwest at lower altitudes, and winds from the west at higher altitudes, creating a zone of shear.

Mesocyclones Spawned Within Thunderheads

When rising warm air meets cooler upper air, clouds form. When those clouds enter the area of such a wind shear, they can begin to spin, forming mesocyclones inside a growing thunderhead.

The forecasters declared a slight risk of severe storms.

At 11:15 a.m. Monday, with one of the day’s two weather balloons in the air and the new crew watching more of the satellite blues turning to blacks, indicating that the storm clouds were reaching 50,000 and 60,000 feet into the atmosphere, they upgraded the warning to a moderate risk of severe storms.

By midafternoon, the four scientists now inside the cramped room were vigorously debating the meaning of the data. “Some were saying, ‘I think this is what’s going to happen,’ and others were saying, ‘Nah, nah, nah, that’s not going to happen,’ ” said Joe Schaefer, the center’s director. “That kind of argument is how you make good decisions.”

The scientists also were factoring in less empirical evidence.

“You went outside and you’d say, damn, it feels like tornadoes,” said Schaefer, a big, garrulous man who has gotten out of the weather prediction business time and again, only to come back for the excitement. “It looked and smelled and tasted like something was going to happen.”

At 3:49 p.m., the warning was upgraded again: High risk.

Twisters Had Seemed to Skirt Oklahoma City

Back in Prosperity Acres, Roy Becker was in the mood for some rototilling. A resident of the neighborhood of 2-acre lots practically his whole life, the 58-year-old Becker knew rain was coming--and perhaps a twister or two somewhere to the rural southwest--and he wanted to do his gardening before the soil was too heavy to turn.

Becker’s wife, Carol, had heard the first warnings, for severe thunderstorms in Lawton. Nothing to worry about. Tornadoes always seemed to arch northeast or southeast, skirting Oklahoma City. (Roy Becker’s theory: Heat from the paved-over plains shoved them away.) But why be silly? Carol said. They ought to go around the corner and stay with Roy’s 85-year-old mother, Helen--just to make sure she’s comfortable, she’s safe.

Darrell Witt, a firefighter for Oklahoma City, and his wife, Ladonna, were celebrating. It had been three weeks since they bought the house across the street from Helen Becker and the Fryars, in the neighborhood where Darrell had grown up. More important, however, this was their 14th anniversary. And at 5 p.m., they headed for the local Red Lobster.

Seventy-six tornadoes were about to curl down into Oklahoma and Kansas. The biggest of them all--a rare “long-track” twister that at times ranked an F-5 on the Fujita scale, indicating winds of more than 261 mph--would touch down in Lawton, 50 miles to the southwest, and take a wriggling path toward Prosperity Acres.

Quarter-Sized Hail Falling on Lawton

By the time Roy Becker found out that the soil was too wet to till even before the rain had started and the Witts were well into their seafood, the Forecast Center had gone on the measured high-alert of meteorologists who see a lot of tornadoes.

Forecaster Andra--a tall, thin 36-year-old with a cell phone on his belt and a scientific voice--learned at 4:21 p.m. that hail the size of quarters was falling on Lawton. Based on radar and satellite readings and reports from amateur radio operators, he and his team issued their first tornado warning 25 minutes later, for Lawton and adjacent Grady County.

By 4:58, the reflectivity radar was changing from yellows to reds and purples, indicating serious precipitation and hail. The hailstones, observers on the ground radioed in, were now 2 inches in diameter.

The velocity radar began showing bright greens and blood reds swirling together. The storm was rotating.

By 5:22, the system, still no more than a vicious, wet hailstorm, had made its way 25 miles northeast from Lawton to Cyril. The office issued a tornado warning for Cyril and, 10 miles farther northeast, Chickasha.

“When it got up toward Chickasha--to be honest, we were getting very nervous,” said Kevin Brown, a 31-year-old meteorologist at the Forecast Center who grew up in the Texas Panhandle and knew something of tornadoes long before he began studying them. “When they get that big and that strong and head toward a city, you can warn everybody, but you know they’re going to do a lot of damage.”

At 5:52, more than 38 hours after their colleagues in the Storm Prediction Center issued the first heads-up, the tornado touched down southwest of Chickasha.

Moving at 35 mph, it spirited away cars and homes and lush lawns in the small town. The hailstones were the size of baseballs. People were dying.

The Fryars’ had gotten a call from their daughter and turned on their TV; all the local stations had gone live and would stay live for the next 30 hours. The Beckers were headed to Roy’s mother’s house, just in case. The Witts were finishing dinner and on their way to a drugstore to pick up a prescription.

A television was turned on at the drugstore. The message was from the Forecast Center: “Tornadoes moving into Oklahoma City metro area. Take precautions.” The Witts headed home and turned on their TV.

Small, battery-operated National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration radios were chirping and blinking throughout the neighborhood.

At 7:11, the tornado crossed the South Canadian river and moved into the city. The Fryars figured it would miss them to the east. So did the Beckers and the Witts. Eight minutes later, the forecasters issued a warning for the entire metropolitan area. The twister was churning up May and 119th streets and heading toward Del City, on the far side of Prosperity Acres.

Roy Becker put his mother, wife and several other relatives in the cellar. He and son Ronnie kept watch out the living room window.

At 7:31, the urgent warning went out. The tornado was near the Crossroads Mall, barely two miles away.

“We both had a gut feeling,” Darrell Witt said later, doing his best not to choke up. He piled his family in their Dodge Stratus and floored it straight west. He could see the tornado arrive in his rearview mirror.

Roy and Ronnie Becker sprinted to the storm cellar, slammed the doors overhead and hung on ropes attached to the door handles.

Fryar wrapped himself around his wife. Lifelong Baptists, they didn’t have time to pray.

The funnel sucked up entire groves of 50-year-old elms and 30-foot pines. The trees that it didn’t take it stripped not only of their branches but of their bark.

It smashed half of the Witt home down into its foundation and took most of the rest away, along with their shiny Dodge pickup, a utility trailer and 9-year-old Michelle’s pet rabbit. The family fled and returned in less than 10 minutes. When they got back, 3-year-old Devin said, “Oh, no, my house is broke.”

So was the Boyd home next door. The Boyds were three miles away in a storm cellar, but their car was gone and the unrecognizable frame of their motor home, which had been parked in the garage, now was crushing their neighbor to death a quarter-mile to the east.

The Beckers emerged to find Helen’s home battered, paint peeled away, but largely intact.

So Roy and Ronnie Becker went looking for the Fryars.

The funnel had sucked the Fryar home into its blackness almost whole--the roof, the porch, and all the walls, the grandfather clock, two blue easy chairs and the television set.

It lifted the sofa off the floor and pulled the carpet into the sky. But it set the sofa back down on the old wood.

When Roy and Ronnie found the couple more than half an hour later, they were still clutching each other, their eyes glued partially shut by a mortar of mud and ceiling insulation.

Ronnie slung A.D. over his shoulder “like a sack of feed,” Roy took Elsie by the arm, and they took them home to wash their faces and hair and get them into some dry clothes.

Then the Beckers, as well as Darrell Witt, went searching for others. When they found the woman under the motor home, she had no pulse, but her husband was holding her hand anyway.

Minutes after it wiped away much of Prosperity Acres, the tornado was doing the same to Del City. And the forecasters were issuing more warnings for the communities ahead--Midwest City, Choctaw, Western Lincoln County.

Then at 7:46, near the intersection of Reno Avenue and Post Road in Midwest City, the storm began to weaken.

And at 7:50, just before entering Choctaw, the twister itself was sucked back up into the debris-filled sky.

It would reform a few minutes later, but was never the same storm again.

The monster tornado had killed 38 people, (three more were to die from injuries), caused nearly $1 billion in property damage and laid waste to a strip of land a half-mile wide and 70 miles long.

Back at the Forecast Center, meteorologists hardly noticed it vanish. They had known the tornado was weakening fast and were trying to concentrate on the dozens of other twisters spinning across the Midwest. Eight people already were dead in Kansas.

At the Storm Prediction Center across the way, forecasters also were turning their attention elsewhere. The Doppler display screens were churning out bright greens in the West, and the satellites showed the reds of high-altitude clouds forming along the Dry Line.

More weather was coming. New storms were two days away.

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Tracking the Tornado

National Weather Service forecasters in Oklahoma used Doppler radar to follow the path of the deadly tornado on Monday. Doppler allows forecasters to issue warnings to television and radio stations up to 20 minutes before a tornado touches the ground.

How Doppler Radar Works

Doppler radar is used to measure wind velocity as well as moisture content inside clouds. Doppler can pick up storm clouds up to 150 miles away.