Survivor hunt winds down in ripped city

Oklahoma deaths put at 24 from maximum-fury twister

The rubble of Plaza Towers Elementary School can be seen near the crane at the bottom of this aerial photo taken Tuesday over Moore, Okla.
The rubble of Plaza Towers Elementary School can be seen near the crane at the bottom of this aerial photo taken Tuesday over Moore, Okla.

MOORE, Okla. - Helmeted rescue workers raced Tuesday to complete the search for survivors and the dead in the Oklahoma City suburb where a tornado razed block after block of homes, cleared lots down to bare red earth and claimed 24 lives.

Scientists concluded the storm was a rare and extraordinarily powerful type of twister known as an EF5, which is capable of lifting reinforced buildings off the ground, hurling cars like missiles and stripping trees completely free of bark.

Meanwhile, residents of Moore began returning to their homes a day after the tornado smashed some neighborhoods into jagged wood scraps and gnarled pieces of metal. In place of their houses, many families found only empty lots.

Gary Bird, the city’s fire chief, said that more than 200 people worked overnight Monday and into Tuesday looking for survivors.

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The risk of tornadoes throughout the region remained at an elevated level through Tuesday, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, and throughout the day, rescue efforts were hampered by wind and rain.

Bird said he thought the search would be completed by sundown Tuesday, but he was confident no more be found in the rubble.

“I’m 98 percent sure we’re good,” Bird said at a news conference with the governor, who had just completed an aerial tour of the disaster zone.

Authorities were so focused on the search effort that they had yet to establish the full scope of damage along the storm’s long, ruinous path.



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The death toll was revised downward from 51 after the state medical examiner said some victims may have been counted twice in the confusion.

Hospital officials said Tuesday that they had treated hundreds of patients. Norman Regional Hospital spokesman Melissa Herron said 20 of the more than 100 patients her hospital treated were still being cared for Tuesday.

Other hospitals said about 40 of the more than 200 patients they had treated remained hospitalized.

Oklahoma lawmakers on Tuesday began the process of appropriating millions of dollars in emergency funds to help pay the cost of recovering from the Moore tornado and a separate tornado Sunday that left two dead in Shawnee.

Separate committees of the House and Senate on Tuesday approved a plan to appropriate $45 million from the state’s Rainy Day Constitutional Reserve Fund. The money will go to the State Emergency Fund to help recovery from the storms.

Republican Sen. Clark Jolley of Edmond said the money will help the state Department of Emergency Management match disaster aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency or to pay costs not covered by federal dollars.

FEMA generally pays 75 percent of the cost of disaster recovery, and state and local governments split the remaining costs, officials said.

Meanwhile, low water pressure in about a dozen state buildings in Oklahoma City forced officials to close them because of health and safety concerns.

Michelle Day, administrator of the state Capital Assets Management Division, said the problems were related to the tornado. Oklahoma City officials said power was restored Tuesday to a water treatment plant that lost power during the storm.

Day said low water pressure affected her agency’s ability to keep restrooms open throughout the Capitol complex. The affected agencies were expected to resume their normal operations today.

Buildings affected included those housing the Department of Transportation and the attorney general’s office.

36-MINUTE HEADS-UP

Residents of Moore had about 36 minutes to prepare for the twister, according to the National Weather Service.

The federal agency issued its first warning at 2:40 p.m., 16 minutes before the tornado touched down about 10 miles west of the city, said David Andra, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Norman.

The tornado reached Moore at 3:16 p.m., he said.

The average lead time for tornado warnings is 13 minutes, and the added warning time probably saved many lives, experts said.

By Tuesday afternoon, every damaged home had been searched at least once, Bird said.

The fire chief’s goal was to conduct three searches of each building just to be certain there were no more bodies or survivors.

He was hopeful that could be completed before nightfall, but efforts were being hampered by heavy rain. Crews also continued a brick-bybrick search of the rubble of a school that was blown apart with many children inside.

No additional survivors or bodies had been found since Monday night, Bird said.

Survivors emerged with harrowing accounts of the storm’s wrath, which many endured as they shielded loved ones.

Chelsie McCumber grabbed her 2-year-old son, Ethan, wrapped him in jackets and covered him with a mattress before they squeezed into a coat closet in their house. McCumber sang to her child when he complained it was getting hot inside the small space.

“I told him we’re going to play tent in the closet,” she said, beginning to cry.

“I just felt air, so I knew the roof was gone,” she said Tuesday, standing under the sky where her roof should have been. The home was littered with wet gray insulation and all of their belongings.

“Time just kind of stood still” in the closet, she recalled. “I was kind of holding my breath thinking this isn’t the worst of it. I didn’t think that was it. I kept waiting for it to get worse.

“When I got out, it was worse than I thought,” she said.

Gov. Mary Fallin lamented the loss of life, especially of the nine children killed, but she celebrated the town’s resilience.

“We will rebuild, and we will regain our strength,” Fallin said.

In describing the bird’seye view of the damage, the governor said many houses were “taken away,” leaving “just sticks and bricks, basically. It’s hard to tell if there was a structure there or not.”

From the air, large stretches of town could been seen where every home had been cut to pieces. Some homes were sucked off their concrete slabs. A pond was filled with piles of wood and an overturned trailer.

Also visible were large patches of red earth where the tornado scoured the land down to the soil. Some tree trunks were still standing, but the winds ripped away their leaves, limbs and bark.

In revising its estimate of the storm’s power, the National Weather Service saidthe tornado, which was on the ground for 40 minutes, was a top-of-the-scale EF5 twister with winds of at least 200 mph.

The agency upgraded the tornado from an EF4 on the enhanced Fujita scale on the basis of reports from a damage-assessment team, said spokesman Keli Pirtle. Monday’s twister was at least a half-mile wide, and it was the first EF5 tornado of 2013.

SCHOOL SEARCH

Several search-and-rescue teams focused their efforts Tuesday at Plaza Towers Elementary School, where the storm ripped off the roof, knocked down walls and destroyed the playground as pupils and teachers huddled in hallways and bathrooms.

Seven of the nine dead children were killed at the school, but several pupils were pulled alive from under a collapsed wall and other heaps of mangled debris.

Rescue workers passed the survivors down a human chain of parents and neighborhood volunteers. Parents carried children in their arms to a triage center in the parking lot.

Plaza Towers and another school in Oklahoma City that was not as severely damaged did not have reinforced storm shelters, or safe rooms, said Albert Ashwood, the director of the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management.

More than 100 schools across the state do have safe rooms, he said, adding that it’s up to each jurisdiction to set priorities for which schools get limited funding for safe rooms.

Ashwood said a shelter would not necessarily have saved more lives at Plaza Towers.

“When you talk about any kind of safety measures … it’s a mitigating measure, it’s not an absolute,” he said. “There’s not a guarantee that everyone will be totally safe.”

Officials were still trying to account for a handful of children not found at the school who may have gone home early with their parents, Bird said Tuesday.

Elsewhere, Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said Tuesday that it will make donations of cash and materials equal to $1 million to aid Moore’s recovery. Wal-Mart also was sending truckloads of food, water and other basic items to serve as immediate aid.

The world’s largest retailer said no customers or employees were injured in its two stores in Moore but some workers’ homes were destroyed.

Wal-Mart also said it wassending workers from Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Texas to the affected areas so members of Oklahoma crews could be with their families.

Moore has a population of about 55,000. It has been one of the fastest-growing suburbs of Oklahoma City, attracting middle-income families and young couples looking for stable schools and affordable homes.

Many residents commute to jobs in Oklahoma City or to Tinker Air Force Base, which is about 20 minutes away.

Information for this article was contributed by Christopher Sherman, Sean Murphy, Tim Talley, Ramit Plushnick-Masti, Nomaan Merchant, Sue Ogrocki and staff members of The Associated Press; by Michael C. Bender of Bloomberg News; and by John Eligon, Manny Fernandez and Michael Schwirtz of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/22/2013

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