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Emergency crews and volunteers continued their frantic search last night for survivors of a massive tornado that ripped through parts of Oklahoma City and its suburbs, killing dozens of people and flattening whatever was in its path, including a hospital and at least two schools late on Monday.
Officials have now lowered their estimated death toll from 91 to 24, which includes nine children. More than 200 are believed to be injured. US president Barack Obama declared a major disaster area in the suburb of Moore, ordering federal aid to supplement state and local efforts there. "The people of Moore should know that their country will remain on the ground, there for them, beside them, as long as it takes," he said at the White House.
Much of the tornado damage was in Moore, where rescue workers struggled through debris-clogged streets and downed power lines to those feared trapped under mountains of rubble. Rescuers equipped with thermal-imaging equipment and dogs sifted through plywood boards, upended cars and steel beams where houses and shops once stood.
Trapped children
Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore was reduced to a pile of twisted metal and toppled walls. Rescue workers were able to pull several children from the rubble, and as a chilly rain swept through the area, crews struggled to cut through fallen beams and clear debris.
As a helicopter circled overhead and thunder rumbled from another storm, 35-year-old Moore resident Juan Dills and his family rummaged through the remains of what was once his mother’s home. The foundation was laid bare, the roof ripped away and only one wall remained standing. They found a few family photograph albums, but little else. “We are still in shock,” he said. “But we will come through. We’re from Oklahoma.”
Jayme Shelton, a Moore spokesman, said “we are still definitely in search-and-rescue mode”.
Storm alerts
Speaking outside Norman Regional Hospital, Ninia Lay (48) said she huddled in a closet through two storm alerts and the tornado hit on the third.
“I was hiding in the closet and I heard something like a train coming,” she said, under skies still flashing with lightning. The house was flattened and she was buried in the rubble for two hours. She was able to call her husband Kevin on her mobile phone and rescuers came to dig her out. Her seven-year-old daughter Catherine, a first-grader at Plaza Towers, took shelter with classmates and teachers in a bathroom when the tornado hit and destroyed the school. She escaped with scrapes and cuts.
At Briarwood Elementary School in Oklahoma City, on the border with Moore, cars were thrown through the facade and the roof was torn off.
“Numerous neighbourhoods were completely levelled,” said Sgt Gary Knight of the Oklahoma city police department. “Neighbourhoods just wiped clean.”
He said debris and damage to roadways, along with heavy traffic, were hindering emergency responders as they raced to the affected areas.
A spokeswoman for the mayor’s office in Moore said emergency workers were struggling to assess the damage. “Please send us your prayers,” she said.
Shortly before midnight, the area near the Plaza Towers school was eerily quiet and shrouded in darkness from a widespread power cut. Local authorities and FBI agents patrolled the streets, restricting access to the school.
Half a mile from the school, the only sounds on Southwest Fourth Street were of barking dogs and tires on wet pavement littered with debris. Hovering in the sky, a helicopter beamed a spotlight on the damaged neighbourhoods. In the darkness, the century-old Moore cemetery was a ghostly wreck: women’s clothing and blankets clung to the branches of tilting trees and twisted sheets of metal ripped from nearby buildings or homes were strewn among the graves. Many headstones had been pushed flat to the ground by the wind.
Brooke Cayot, a spokeswoman for Integris Southwest Medical Center in Oklahoma City, said 58 patients had come in by about 9pm. An additional 85 were being treated at Oklahoma University Medical Center in Oklahoma City.
“They’ve been coming in minute by minute,” said Ms Cayot.
On ground for 40 minutes
The 3km-wide (two miles) tornado touched down at 2:56pm on Monday, 16 minutes after the first warning went out, and travelled for 20 miles, said Keli Pirtle, a spokeswoman for the National Weather Service in Norman, Oklahoma. It was on the ground for 40 minutes, she said, struck the town of Newcastle and travelled about 10 miles to Moore, which has a population of about 55,000.
Ms Pirtle said early data suggested that it was a category 4 tornado on the Enhanced Fujita scale, which measures tornado strength on a scale of zero to five. The tornado's winds were estimated to have up to 320 kph.
– (
New York Times
/Reuters)