Oklahoma stricken

Tornado’s toll at 51, rise likely

A woman carries her child through a field near the collapsed Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., Monday, May 20, 2013. A tornado as much as a mile (1.6 kilometers) wide with winds up to 200 mph (320 kph) roared through the Oklahoma City suburbs Monday, flattening entire neighborhoods, setting buildings on fire and landing a direct blow on an elementary school. (AP Photo Sue Ogrocki)
A woman carries her child through a field near the collapsed Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., Monday, May 20, 2013. A tornado as much as a mile (1.6 kilometers) wide with winds up to 200 mph (320 kph) roared through the Oklahoma City suburbs Monday, flattening entire neighborhoods, setting buildings on fire and landing a direct blow on an elementary school. (AP Photo Sue Ogrocki)

MOORE, Okla. - A monstrous tornado at least a half-mile wide roared through the Oklahoma City suburbs Monday, flattening entire neighborhoods and destroying an elementary school as children and teachers huddled against winds of up to 200 mph. At least 51 people were killed, including at least 20 children, and officials said the death toll was expected to rise.

Oklahoma authorities expect as many as 40 more bodies to be sent to the morgue, said Amy Elliott, chief administrative officer for the state medical examiner.

The storm laid waste to scores of buildings in Moore, a community of 41,000 people south of Oklahoma City. It left block after block in ruins. Homes were crushed into piles of broken wood. Cars and trucks were left crumpled on the roadside.

“They are still in the process of picking through the rubble to try to find survivors,” Jerry Lojka, a spokesman for Oklahoma Emergency Management, said in an interview. “We know it was on the ground for 40 minutes. It traveled across the entire city of Moore.”

“There are entire blocks that are wiped clean to the foundations,” Lojka said. “It went through residential areas, business areas. We know a hospital is heavily damaged. Two elementary schools are heavily damaged.”

Keli Pirtle, a spokesman for the National Weather Service in Norman, Okla., said the tornado touched down at 2:56 p.m. and traveled for 20 miles. It was on the ground for 40 minutes, she said. It struck the town of Newcastle and traveled about 10 miles to Moore.

The preliminary indications are that the tornado was at least an EF4, said Ryan Barnes, a weather service meteorologist. An EF4 designation signifies wind gusts of 166-200 mph for three seconds.

The tornado was part of an outbreak of violent weather that slashed the nation’s midsection, prompting severe-weather alerts from Texas to Michigan. The atmospheric conditions included a powerful system from the west colliding with warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, a perfect recipe for tornadoes and super-cell thunderstorms, said Russell Schneider, the director of theNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman. The violent weather was slowly migrating to the east.

More than 120 people were being treated at hospitals Monday afternoon and evening, including about 50 children.

“I’m sick to my stomach,” said Jayme Shelton, a spokesman for the city of Moore, when reached by telephone. “Send your prayers this way.”

Shelton said the city’s nearly 160 police officers and firefighters were going door-todoor, checking for people who might be trapped in the rubble. Search-and-rescue teams poured in from every corner of the state.

“This is terrible. This is war-zone terrible,” said a helicopter reporter for KFOR-TV, Channel 4, in Oklahoma City. “This school is completely gone. … This whole area is destroyed. The houses are destroyed, completely leveled.”

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin deployed 80 National Guard members to assist with search-and-rescue operations and activated extra highway patrol officers.

Fallin said Monday that the troops will also help establish a perimeter around some of the most devastated areas.

President Barack Obama spoke with Fallin to share his concern and assured her that his administration is ready to assist the state’s emergency responders. He later declared a major disaster in Oklahoma and ordered federal financial aid available to affected people in five counties, according to a White House statement.

The assistance includes grants to cover home repair and temporary housing costs, along with loans to help pay for uninsured property losses. Funding will also be available to the state and eligible local governments.

Obama also gave Fallin a direct line to his office.

The White House said Obama told the governor that he has directed the government and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide any assistance she needs. FEMA has sent a special team to Oklahoma’s emergency operations center to help out and dispatch resources.

“It’s as bad as it looks,” U.S. Rep. James Lankford, R-Okla., whose district includes most of neighboring Oklahoma City, said Monday evening as he left the House floor, checking his phone for updates.

The House is to pause today for a moment of silence.

In Northwest Arkansas, funnel clouds were reported, but unconfirmed, Monday evening as the system moved northeast. The Springdale Police Department reported one storm-related traffic death. About 7:30 p.m., debris from a severe storm struck a vehicle driven by 19-year-old man. His name was not released late Monday.

Many telephone lines to stricken areas in Oklahoma were down, and cell-phone traffic was congested. The tornado that hit Moore was so large that it will take timefor rescuers’ damage reports to reach state officials, the governor said.

Interstate 35 in Moore reopened in both directions late Monday, but the Oklahoma Department of Transportation continued to discourage travel in the area, saying first responders and utility crews needed clear lanes of travel.

In video of the storm, the dark funnel cloud marches slowly across the green landscape. As it churns through the community, it scatters shards of wood, and pieces of insulation, awnings, shingles and glass all over the streets.

It destroyed a school where rescuers launched a desperate effort to pull children from heaps of debris and carry them to a triage center.

At Plaza Towers Elementary School, the storm tore off the roof, knocked down walls and turned the playground into a mass of twisted plastic and metal.

Children from the school were among the dead, but several students were pulled alive from the rubble. Rescue workers passed some of the survivors along a human chain to the triage center in the parking lot.

James Rushing, who lives across the street from the school, heard reports of the approaching tornado and ran to the school, where his 5-year-old foster son, Aiden, attends classes. Rushing said he thought he would be saferthere.

“About two minutes after I got there, the school started coming apart,” he said.

Some of the students were huddled in a restroom.

Douglas Sherman drove two blocks from his home to help look for survivors.

“Just having those kids trapped in that school, that really turns the table on a lot of things,” he said.

Tiffany Thronesberry said she got an alarming call from her mother, Barbara Jarrell, after the tornado.

“I got a phone call from her screaming, ‘Help! Help! I can’tbreathe. My house is on top of me!’” Thronesberry said.

Thronesberry hurried to her mother’s house, where first responders had already pulled her mother out of the debris. Her mother was later hospitalized for treatment of cuts and bruises.

Fallin said “hearts are broken” for parents left wondering about the fate of their children.

Fallin said during a Monday news conference that a center for people seeking loved ones had been set up at a church in Moore. She said first responders were working as quickly asthey could scouring the rubble.

Search-and-rescue efforts were to continue throughout the night.

By Monday evening, a Facebook page created to help connect survivors with loved ones had a growing number of posts, most from people searching for the missing.

“Looking for my Aunt Iris Irwin,” read one post.

“Looking for 5yo Harry,” read another.

Facilities around the region mobilized to aid recovery operations. The housing office at the University of Oklahoma took a couple of dozen calls from people displaced by the tornado, said Rebecca Hooper, a 19-year-old junior.

The university was preparing to possibly take in people left homeless by the tornado.

“We’re taking down names, phone numbers, ages, genders and whether families have animals,” Hooper said.

The Salvation Army said it is activating disaster response teams and mobile feeding units to help residents and rescuers in Moore.

The organization said Monday that its Arkansas-Oklahoma division was supplying the teams.

The American Red Cross was sending similar assistance. It was also working to link loved ones in Moore through a website called Safe and Well. The site is: www.safeandwell. org.

People can enter their information on the site or use a search feature to see if their loved ones are listed.

The Red Cross in Oklahoma City said it was opening a shelter at St. Andrews Church at Southwest 119th and South May. The city is also using that location as a reunification site.

Kansas agencies and volunteers were preparing for what they anticipate will be a request for help.

“We are just not getting any information in terms of specifics,” said Bev Morlan, regional executive director of the Midway-Kansas chapter of the American Red Cross. “We expect to get requests for volunteers to go, but it takes time.”

Some Oklahoma organizations were struggling to respond to the emergency after suffering damage of their own. The tornado ripped off the second floor of the Moore Medical Center, said Kelly Wells, a spokesman for Norman Regional Medical Center.

“We had a direct hit from the tornado that pretty much demolished the second floor of the hospital,” she said. There were about 30 patients in the hospital when the tornado tore through, but all had been moved to a safer bottom floor.

Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management spokesman Keli Cain said the Moore Medical Center was evacuated and all 13 patients were transferred to other facilities. Cain said she didn’t know the conditions of the patients or the extent of the damage at the hospital, which is southwest of Oklahoma City.

Oklahoma City Police Capt. Dexter Nelson said downed power lines and open gas lines posed a risk in the aftermath of the storm system.

Officials said the Draper Water Treatment Plant in Oklahoma City was knocked off-line during the tornado. The city asked residents and businesses in southeast Oklahoma City to stop using water.

In May 1999, Moore was the scene of another huge tornado in which winds reached record speeds of 302 mph. Monday’s was the fourth tornado to hit Moore since 1998. A twister also struck in 2003.

Monday’s devastation in Oklahoma came nearly two years after a tornado ripped through Joplin, Mo., killing 158 people and injuring hundreds more.

That May 22, 2011, tornado was the deadliest in the United States since modern tornado record-keeping began in 1950, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Before Joplin, the deadliest modern tornado was in June 1953 in Flint, Mich., when 116 people died.

Officials in Joplin have also brought together a team of public-safety employees to send to Moore.

Joplin City Manager Mark Rohr said his community remembers the assistance it received in 2011 and feels an obligation to lend a hand in Moore.

Monday’s storm system continued to churn east, and forecasters warned that new tornadoes could form. Schneider said the risk of tornadoes remained high going into today.

“This is prime time in the Great Plains for severe weather, and May is the real peak,” he said.

Information for this article was contributed by Tim Talley and staff members of The Associated Press; by Joel Achenbach, Lenny Bernstein, Brady Dennis, Darryl Fears and Jason Samenow of The Washington Post; by Michael Schwirtz and Nick Oxford of The New York Times; by Beccy Tanner of The Wichita Eagle; by Alan Semuels and Hailey Branson-Potts of the Los Angeles Times; and by Michael B. Marois, James Rowley, Brian K. Sullivan, Michael Shepard and Mary Schlangenstein of Bloomberg News.

photo

This map shows where a tornado hit the Oklahoma City area on Monday, May 20, 2013.

Dozens of people are dead after a huge tornado struck Moore, Okla., near Oklahoma City on Monday, May 20, 2013. Rescue crews are searching through the night for survivors and victims in an elementary school that the tornado destroyed.

Huge tornado kills dozens near Oklahoma City

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Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/21/2013

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