Overall, almost 1,000 people are injured; almost 5,000 buildings -- homes, churches, libraries, businesses -- destroyed. More than $500 million in damages. By Thursday, the living were starting to sound grateful, to find silver linings. In Oklahoma City, seven-year-old Megan Varva was showing off her new outfit, the first of many replacements to come. Scott Pitman remembered a woman who had let go of the underpass she was clinging to to hand off her young son. She was swept away; the son survived. For Bruce Silsby, an owner of a destroyed surplus store, reality is a simple matter of moving forward. "Yesterday was the shock of, 'I've lost everything,'" he said. "Now it doesn't matter. We can replace it." Some of it.
Oklahomans Pick Up the Pieces, Count the Cost
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OKLAHOMA CITY: The living are still returning to the flattened places where their homes once stood, to see what the wind left behind. They are finding more dead; as the lists are compiled, said Gov. Frank Keating Thursday, the final toll could rise above 90 in Oklahoma alone. They are finding guns, dropped from the sky, or finding that the gun they had is gone and in someone else's hands. And they are finding that they have much to do: In tiny Mulhall, Okla., population 260, the twisters laid waste to over 90 percent of the town's buildings.