Death Toll 43; Havoc Prevails After Twisters

MOORE, Okla. —  Unbelievable. That’s what everyone kept muttering, that same, empty word: Unbelievable.

Nearly five dozen tornadoes had shredded Oklahoma and ripped through Kansas late Monday, the most potent of them approaching an F-5, the deadliest classification. At least 43 were dead. Hundreds injured. And more than 2,000 homes were destroyed.

As rescue teams, including National Guard troops, bulldozed the rubble Tuesday, looking for anyone who might still be buried, survivors could say only: “Unbelievable.”

An early tornado spotting system--broadcast incessantly on TV and radio--had given most residents in the danger zones at least a few minutes of warning. There were other signs, too: The sky blackened. Some saw an enormous funnel cloud, up to a mile wide, racing toward them. But where to take cover?

Although Oklahoma sits squarely in Tornado Alley, and twisters tear through here year after year, many homes are built on concrete slab foundations, without basements or storm cellars. So people cowered where they felt safest: in closets, in bathtubs, under mattresses. When they emerged, the lucky ones who survived, they saw a world knocked crazily off kilter.

Here was a 10,000-pound camper flipped upside down and tossed on top of a tree, smashing it. There was a house ripped apart so thoroughly that it looked like a pile of the shredded paper you might use to line a bird cage. There was a dead horse in a school parking lot. A bloated cow on someone’s lawn. Telephone poles had toppled. Roofs had vanished. A favorite couch stuck on its side in a soggy mess of mud, the cushions nowhere to be found.

Here in this once-tidy suburb of Oklahoma City, Herman Blackward looked at it all incredulously. He knew that, although it surely was unbelievable, he would just as surely have to wrap his mind around it. So he tried.

“That’s my house,” said Blackward, a 61-year-old truck driver, gesturing toward a few dirt-spattered walls and a pile of bricks. Then, he corrected himself: “That was my house.”

20 Hours, 80 Miles of Horror

The same tortuous reckoning was going on across Oklahoma and Kansas on Tuesday. The killer tornado system, one of the most powerful to ever hit the Midwest, chewed through neighborhood after neighborhood, spawning twister after twister--including one with multiple funnel clouds, an extremely rare phenomenon--for 20 horrifying hours on Monday and into Tuesday. The storm system, meteorologists said, traveled as much as 80 miles all told. Nebraska, Texas and South Dakota also reported twisters.

The numbers tell part of the story. Thirty-eight killed in Oklahoma. Another five dead around Wichita, Kan., including a month-old boy. More than 560 treated for injuries in Oklahoma City emergency rooms--and hundreds of others hurt around the state and in Kansas. The tornadoes destroyed nearly 2,000 homes in Oklahoma and wrecked 1,100 buildings in Kansas. Winds of up to 260 mph, noisy as a freight train, barreled through the flat plains of Oklahoma and due north into Wichita, causing at least $100 million in property damage.

Those numbers stunned even veterans of tornadoes. But they alone couldn’t capture the magnitude of the disaster.

For the official statistics on twister damage don’t mention the kids desperate to find their family cat, Cuddles. They don’t count the scores who wandered, dazed, through Red Cross offices looking for word of loved ones. They don’t begin to make sense of the scream Vincent Alexander let out as he huddled in a closet for what seemed like ages while the tornado stomped down his street, the “No, please God, no!” he shouted again and again as his house groaned, shuddered and crashed in pieces around him.

Nor do the numbers capture any sense of the overwhelming rush to aid victims of the storms.

Relief Supplies Flood In

By Tuesday afternoon, so many people had dropped off clothing, food, diapers and toys in Oklahoma that some centers were crammed too full to accept even one more can of formula. Everyone, it seemed, tried to help out: Local gyms offered free showers, apartment complexes promised rent-free rooms, pizza delivery drivers ferried donations. Some families who had survived unscathed even opened their homes to strangers in need.

The official response was quick as well. President Clinton declared 11 counties in Oklahoma and one in Kansas disaster areas and announced plans to fly to Oklahoma City on Saturday to assess the damage himself. The National Guard imposed a strict curfew around Oklahoma City--ordering that everyone be off the streets by 7:30--in order to prevent looting. Gov. Frank Keating and his advisors, meanwhile, tried to rally Oklahomans with a pledge to set things right.

“We will rebuild this state,” vowed Bob Ricks, Oklahoma’s director of public safety.

Pounding rain, mixed with bursts of hail, hampered search efforts until the weather cleared early Tuesday afternoon. And with many relatives still seeking loved ones, authorities weren’t sure whether anyone might still be buried in the wreckage. So no one could say just how long the seek-and-assess phase might take before cleanup work could begin.

“It doesn’t seem fair,” Ricks said. “It’s very traumatic. But we’re go ing to get through this--and we’re going to get through it all right.”

Despite that official optimism, Cathy Keating, the governor’s wife, acknowledged: “No amount of money from the federal government or insurance [policies] can help these people put their homes and their memories and their lives together.”

Hannah Horsch would have to agree.

A proud 27-year resident of Moore, a middle-class suburb of Oklahoma City, Horsch even remembers the date she moved into her three-bedroom home here: Aug. 1, 1972.

On Tuesday, that was about all she could bring herself to remember.

She survived the twister by jamming into an underground storm cellar with a dozen neighbors and two dogs. In the sweaty, clammy tightness of that cellar, she heard the tornado screech down her street, heard wood twisting and trees toppling and too many sickening sounds to decipher. When the noises stopped and she poked her head out, her instant assessment was this: “There was nothing.”

Later, she found that there was something left of her home after all. Her collection of magnets from around the country somehow stayed put on her refrigerator. Her piano stood upright, too, although coated with dirt. Her granddaughters, picking through the rubble on Tuesday, found some of their favorite videos: “Old Yeller,” “Lassie” and “Polyanna.”

But the house Hannah and Orville Horsch had made their home was otherwise demolished.

“I’ll make you a good buy: You can have it all for 50 bucks,” Orville Horsch joked as he trudged into the wreckage on a plank over the mud--a plank that turned out, on closer inspection, to be the front door.

His wife smiled, but she wasn’t really up to joking. She wasn’t up to brave talk about rebuilding, either. “We’re just going to leave it,” she said. “It looks like someone dropped a bomb here.”

She started to choke up, then hugged her granddaughter tight and tried to focus on what really mattered: “We’re safe.”

Folks across Oklahoma City were repeating those words like a mantra Tuesday. Even people accustomed to twisters said they had never seen--or heard, or felt--anything like the massive funnel cloud that formed about 45 miles southwest of Oklahoma City and raked along the ground for up to four hours as residents cowered in closets and bathtubs, shielding their heads with mattresses and pillows and praying, always praying.

In Kansas, an equally strong tornado cut a path of destruction 12 miles long and, in places, up to three miles wide. A trailer park near Wichita was demolished. and winds were so strong, authorities found the snapped-off wing of a small plane about 40 miles from the airport where it belonged.

“Whatever was in its way, [the tornado] just removed it,” Jay Johnson, 49, marveled as he ate a chicken lunch at a shelter in Moore. “It didn’t go around it. It didn’t go under it or over it. It just removed it.”

Indeed, the hardest-hit areas looked like they had been stomped underfoot by a giant, willful toddler who tossed what he couldn’t flatten and smashed what he couldn’t throw.

Huge telephone poles sprawled every which way on the ground, their lines tangled around bushes and trees. Many street lamps still stood, but their lights dangled from snapped fixtures, askew like broken arms.

The destruction was so complete that when Casey File drove into Moore to rescue his grandma and her hearing aid from her wrecked home Monday night, he could not recognize the neighborhood. To his astonishment, he found a letter on the ground that had been mailed, and apparently delivered, to Enid, a city an hour and a half’s drive away.

“I thought maybe I was lost,” he recalled.

He wasn’t.

Around the Oklahoma City area, some blocks smelled of natural gas--officials reported several fires Monday night--and others smelled of fresh-cut lumber from all the wood debris scattered about. In some neighborhoods, homeless cats and dogs wandered the streets. Everything looked muddy brown, even when the sun came out bright and hot on Tuesday afternoon.

Amid the dull shades of devastation, a few bright colors stood out--but in the oddest places. A gold garland of Christmas tinsel sparkled on a field at least 150 feet from the nearest home. An American flag drooped over an exercise bike that was wedged into what used to be someone’s front lawn. A baby doll, splattered with mud, stared face-down in a driveway.

“It’s kind of hard to sort it all out,” Danny Cavett said.

A chaplain at a local children’s hospital, Cavett is used to dealing with pain, used to parrying the inevitable, agonizing “Why?” So as he assessed damage from the tornado, he automatically reminded himself to be grateful he and his family had survived. “The Lord’s blessed me again,” he told himself. He knew, too, to talk through his sorrow when his emotions threatened to overwhelm him. “Debriefing,” he called it, and he was sure it would work.

Still, Cavett found himself almost in a daze Tuesday as he picked his way through the nails and boards that used to be his house. He kept saying he was working on a plan of action. Clearly, he was having a tough time coming up with one.

“What are we going to do next?” he kept musing. “What are we going to do next?”

Then he paused in front of his black Chevrolet pickup. It still ran, he said. It was still, miraculously, in his driveway. But the back window was shattered in a million shards, a stray piece of lumber stuck through the frame and the whole truck looked as thoroughly worn out as its owner.

“I kept this thing in tip-top condition,” Cavett said. He tried a little laugh. “Ha, ha,” he said. “As you can tell.”

He slapped the truck on the side. Then he walked off to work on his plan.

*

Video of the tornadoes and witness accounts as well as additional photographs and updated reports are available on the Times’ Web site: http://netblogpro.com/tornadoes

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Paths of the Deadly Tornadoes

Devastating tornadoes too numerous to count roared across Oklahoma and Kansas on Monday evening. One unusually large and powerful twister formed about 45 miles southwest of Oklahoma City, killing dozens and injuring hundreds as it moved north and east, cutting a path half a mile wide.

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Formula for Disaster

The storms that swept Oklahoma and Kansas are believed to be the product of supercell thunderstorms, the most intense and organized storm. Supercells can last several hours and spin off violent tornadoes. Their giant winds are not just the result of clashing air masses, but of a complex chain of events.