The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (5 page)

Watching Moore rise and evolve around him as a child had made Eddy dream about helping to run a city someday, and when he came back to his hometown after college, he began working his way up through City Hall. In many ways it was a dream job for him. It wasn’t just a career. It was personal. He was serving the town he loved, helping it grow into the thriving city he’d always known it could be. He’d always known that the weather would be a factor in the job. The city had been battered by severe storms for as long as he could remember—windstorms that uprooted trees and torrential rains that caused flooding in parts of town. The tornado sirens had gone off once or twice when he was growing up, but nothing serious had ever hit, just a tiny spout here and there. Some in town still talked about a tiny funnel that had touched down on the football field at Moore High School during a practice one afternoon in the late 1960s—a slender funnel that slunk down from the dark clouds above and zipped back up so quickly some wondered if what they’d witnessed had really happened.

Like the managers of other cities in central Oklahoma, Eddy and his colleagues had planned for a tornado—contemplating how the city would respond if one ever hit. But Eddy never imagined, not even once, how terrible and devastating the storms that began to roll through Moore would be.

Eddy was assistant city manager when the first big tornado hit in October 1998—ripping off roofs and knocking down fences as it moved north along Santa Fe Avenue on the city’s west side. Compared with the storms since, that twister was nothing—a third of a mile wide, with winds measured at about 100 miles per hour. But every tornado, no matter its size, is dangerous, and he remembered how worried he had been for the people of his town as he watched the storm develop. He never imagined that only seven months later Moore would be in the crosshairs of another tornado, a funnel more than three times the size that would go down as one of the most destructive in history. Like others in Moore, Eddy had a vivid memory of that night, the terrible shock he felt as he stood in the middle of one of those flattened neighborhoods looking at unimaginable destruction as far as the eye could see.

By then Eddy was widely regarded around the city as a calm and steady hand in tense moments, exactly the kind of person you wanted in charge when the bad times hit. Quiet and matter-of-fact, he was not someone who felt the need to talk when words didn’t need to be spoken. He wasn’t someone who got “excitable,” as he often put it. Like many Oklahomans, he didn’t spend time debating why the storms had happened. Eddy saw his job as keeping the city going, no matter what had happened. He was determined to act quickly and get things back on track. But even he couldn’t help but be stunned by the enormity of the May 3 storm. While he was outwardly calm and collected, Eddy’s mind raced with questions, and though he didn’t dare voice them, he had doubts just as everyone did about what the storm meant for his city’s future. How could they recover? How would they deal with all this debris? Millions of tons of destroyed houses and the evidence of the lives within them blown across town by the most ruthless storm he’d ever known. Where would they even begin?

Put in charge of overseeing the city’s cleanup, Eddy filed his doubts away and got to work. It was what he had been hired to do, and the people around him did the same, eager to restore what sense of normalcy they could. Within three weeks the city had hired an outside contractor to begin carting the debris away. And mindful that other storms could hit, Moore city officials, at Eddy’s urging, approved a preexisting contract with the same company for future storms, so that the city could get to the task of rebuilding far more quickly if something like this were to happen again. “Nothing good happens until all of that crap is gone,” Eddy bluntly told his colleagues. It turned out to be an incredibly insightful decision—as more storms followed. Suddenly, government officials from all over the country descended on Moore, this tiny little town that few people had ever heard of, to study how Eddy and his colleagues had helped their city bounce back. Eddy took it all in stride. “We were just doing our jobs,” he told people. He wasn’t being modest. It was what he really believed.

Over the years, Eddy, who ascended to city manager a few months after the May 3 tornado, came to be regarded across the country as a leading expert on how to respond to tornadoes. Many were specific tasks that could be replicated, but some things simply couldn’t—including the attitude of people in Moore. Outsiders marveled at the town’s resilience, but to Eddy that was simply the way people here were, the way they had been raised. If you were knocked down, you got back up. It was what you did. But he did acknowledge the small-town nature of Moore had helped in the darkest days.

Some of the relationships between people at City Hall dated back decades, to long before they worked for the government. Eddy had known Glenn Lewis, the mayor, and Stan Drake, the assistant city manager, since they were students at Moore High School. They were the same age, and all had graduated the same year: 1973. They knew one another as well as they knew anybody, and that familiarity, personal history, and mutual trust came in handy not only in the storm recovery but also as the city underwent a major transformation in the aftermath of the storm.

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To Eddy and other lifers, there was the Moore before the tornadoes and the Moore that existed afterward. Like everyone, he wished that his town had never known what it was like to go through a horrific twister—much less three of them. But at the same time, Eddy looked for the good in what had happened. The storms had sparked a dramatic revitalization in Moore—as if the twisters, as terrible as they were, had been some strange natural conduit for urban renewal. The wiped-out neighborhoods, rebuilt with brand-new homes, sparked a string of new development and investment that Moore hadn’t experienced since the days before the oil bust. Suddenly, a city that had been long been viewed as something of a no-man’s-land—a few unremarkable exits off Interstate 35 that people passed as they were driving between Oklahoma City and Norman—was reconsidered as an undiscovered paradise for the suburban working class. Young families who wanted to send their kids to good schools in a place where they could still afford to buy a home in a good neighborhood flocked to Moore, and businesses that saw an opportunity to make money followed.

Between 1990 and 2000 Moore’s population lingered at just over 40,000 people—a number impacted by the number of people displaced after the 1999 tornado. But by 2010 the population had jumped to more than 55,000—a number that continued to steadily increase. Developers couldn’t keep up with the demand for homes, and the landscape of Moore began to shift from a quiet, mostly rural bedroom community to a suburban boomtown.

People who had left Moore and came back to visit were astonished at how much their hometown had changed in such a short time. And even natives like Amy Simpson, who had never left, sometimes couldn’t believe it either. She and her family lived a little south of Nineteenth Street in a housing addition that was not even five years old. She was old enough to remember when this part of Moore had been mostly empty farmland, miles and miles of nothing but trees and grassy fields and the occasional bored cow, which tilted its head up and stared at cars cruising the narrow back roads, rough and bumpy, that hadn’t been repaved in years because they saw so little traffic.

When I was growing up, anything south of Nineteenth Street in Moore was considered “out in the country.” But what had been a simple two-lane country road was now a four-lane thoroughfare, one of the busiest stretches in town, lined on both sides with shopping centers that had been built a few years earlier but still looked brand-new. It used to be that people in Moore would have to drive 10 miles south to Norman or north to Oklahoma City to do their shopping, but now big-box retailers were right here on Nineteenth Street: Target, Walmart, Home Depot. The only Starbucks in town was on the corner, next door to the perpetually crowded Chick-fil-A, where the drive-through window would open for breakfast and remain swamped until closing time, as cars wrapped around the building in endless want of a chicken sandwich. It was hard to believe that less than twenty years earlier there hadn’t even been a traffic light on the block—just stop signs that drivers often floated through because there was nobody around to yield to.

When Simpson was a student at Moore High School, most of the kids in town spent their Friday nights cruising in slow circles around the city like a scene out of
American Graffiti,
talking and listening to music and rolling down their windows to yell to friends in other cars. They went up Twelfth Street, down Eastern Avenue in front of the high school, and all the way back down Fourth Street, past the three towering antennas of KOMA, one of the oldest radio stations in the state. Back then the towers were the closest thing Moore had to a landmark, their red and white lights blinking a slow, mesmerizing code that could be seen as far as 20 miles away across the flat landscape. The only other iconic symbol of Moore was the local water tower, which for decades had been painted with a gigantic American-flag smiley face before it was replaced with the town’s name in the mid-1990s.

Now the biggest landmark in town and the major hangout was the Warren Theatres, a massive seventeen-screen cinema a few blocks north of Nineteenth Street that was widely regarded as the best movie house in the entire state. Outfitted with an IMAX theater, it was easily one of the biggest buildings in town, eclipsing the forty-five-bed hospital next door. Many in the area had been shocked when the theater chose to locate in Moore, a town that had for years been snootily regarded by its neighboring cities as a mostly unremarkable city that wasn’t even worth pulling off the highway for.

Moore had expanded so much that it was growing hard to tell where the town ended and the neighboring cities began—especially on the west side, which bordered Oklahoma City. In recent years new homes had cropped up on the landscape like unstoppable weeds. There weren’t enough houses to meet the demands of families who wanted to send their kids to the public schools in Moore, a district that included part of south Oklahoma City. Developers offered big money to farmers willing to sell off their land. While some signed their property over, many still hung on, unwilling to give in to the suburban sprawl.

Running out of space on the west side, Moore had started to expand south toward Norman, a bustling college town of 118,000 that housed the University of Oklahoma, where I went to college, like so many other kids who grew up in Moore. New housing additions and retail developments began to replace the empty countryside along Interstate 35. To people who hadn’t been paying close attention, Moore seemed to have transformed overnight from a sleepy suburb into a boomtown, a city that seemed to be thriving even when the national economy wasn’t.

But Moore’s rebirth was accompanied by nervousness. Many in town cast a wary eye toward the west, wondering if Mother Nature would come and take it all away. A town reborn in part because of a tornado had now expanded into an even bigger target. Around town there was an odd dynamic: People didn’t want to believe God could be callous enough to send another tornado to Moore. But at the same time many believed it would almost certainly happen.

Just a few months earlier a town-hall meeting had been organized by a pair of meteorologists from the University of Oklahoma who had partnered with the National Weather Service to find out what people believed about the weather. The idea was to study superstitions and myths about storms in Oklahoma as a way of understanding how to better communicate the risks of bad weather. At the meetings many old wives’ tales resurfaced. In nearby Norman residents told researchers they felt their city had been spared by storms because the town had been built on an old Native American burial ground. The spirits, they said, had kept the storms away. It was a story that had circulated for generations, though there was little evidence to back it up. Only a few months earlier a small tornado had gone right past the University of Oklahoma, forcing even meteorologists at the National Weather Service, located on the south side of campus, to take cover.

But it was the people in Moore the scientists found most interesting. Around forty people showed up at the local community center—about three times the turnout in other towns. And for more than an hour, residents young and old took turns speculating aloud as to what it was about Moore that made it so unlucky when it came to the weather. Many had shown up not only to share what they thought about the weather but also to find out what others thought—searching for answers to a mystery that baffled even the scientists who knew more about tornadoes than anyone.

One woman, whose home had been destroyed in 1999 and then again in 2003, asked whether it was something about the elevation of the city. Others wondered if it was the city’s location east of the South Canadian River that somehow made it vulnerable. All of the tornadoes that had hit Moore over the years had formed just south of the river, near Newcastle, before moving to the northeast toward Moore. People wondered if it wasn’t something about the mostly dry riverbed that channeled the storms their way, and as they speculated, they looked at the scientists, longing for answers. But there were none. Even they didn’t know why Moore was so unlucky.

At the end of the night, as they had at all their meetings, the scientists asked participants to list the city they believed was most at risk of being hit by future storms. Residents of other cities had been unanimous: It would be Moore. And in Moore the answer was the same: Moore would be hit again. It was only a matter of when. The researchers were caught off guard by how resigned people seemed to their fate. They didn’t sound defeated—just accepting. “They happen, and they happen to us,” one man said.

It was an attitude that Eddy understood. He’d heard it from plenty of people over the years. After the tornadoes he’d worried that people might move away from Moore, concerned about living in a town that had been hit by storms that had followed eerily similar paths. But while some did move away, others stayed put—and new residents joined them, hoping and praying the storms would stay away. Eddy knew his job wasn’t to try to understand the whys and hows of the storms. But there were moments when he couldn’t help himself, and he’d quizzed meteorologists about the theories he’d heard over the years. Nobody knew. It all seemed to be just bad luck.