Luckily for the Douglases, the storm deposited them outside in the driveway, stunned but only marked with cuts and bruises. Like thousands of other people in the Oklahoma City area, they had survived a storm whose top speed was reliably clocked at 318 miles an hour–the highest wind ever recorded on earth. This was an F-5 on the Fujita scale, or, as meteorologist Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storms Laboratory puts it, “a moose.” It was the biggest of 76 tornadoes to hit Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas on the same day, killing more than 46 people and injuring over 700. (Well to the east, another string of twisters would kill four people in Tennessee.) The F-5 touched down shortly before 6 p.m. last Monday and spent the next two hours carving a frightful swath through bedroom communities like Newcastle and Moore. “It started as multiple funnels that danced around each other,” says helicopter pilot Jim Gardner, who was airborne about a mile away. “All of a sudden the dance got tighter and they converged into one.”
The storm laid waste to suburban neighborhoods like a combine mowing wheat: in one disastrous day, more than 10,000 homes were destroyed and property damage was estimated at more than $1 billion in Oklahoma alone. The death toll, by comparison, was relatively low because of repeated alerts broadcast throughout the afternoon and early evening. But even with up to 30 minutes’ warning of the storm’s approach, many residents found they had little protection from the F-5’s awesome power. “Very few people in the city areas had basement shelters,” says R. L. Young of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “They had nowhere to go.” Thankful for their nearly miraculous escape, Jan Douglas said she and her family are determined to start over in Oklahoma City. “We’ll build again,” she says. “But by God, we’re going to have a storm cellar.”
