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Shortly after 2:30 p.m. C.T., the team had seen enough. Something big was gathering near the Oklahoma City suburbs south of Interstate 40 and east of I-44. Using preformatted text to save precious seconds, they approved the strongest warning the Weather Service can give: a "tornado emergency." The designation was created by the man who is now Smith's boss, meteorologist David Andra Jr., during the May 3, 1999 storm that spun up winds in excess of 300 m.p.h. in the town of Moore, Okla.--the highest winds ever recorded. Andra's designation means simply, "this is not your usual Oklahoma tornado," says Smith. "This is different; this is deadly."
Moore is just south of Interstate 40 and east of I-44.
With the press of a "return" key, the warning was issued at 2:40 p.m. The people of Moore had 16 minutes.
Sirens and Decisions
What can you do with 16 minutes?
Kelly Byrne is the mother of two little girls and owner of a small business called Scribbles and Dribbles, makers of cute stuff for babies. When the warning was issued, she was at home in Moore, a fast-growing suburb of some 56,000 residents. Her girls are 4 and 1, and she tries "really hard not to scare them." But as a lifelong resident of Tornado Alley, she knows the value of vigilance. "Anytime there's really severe weather, we start preparing, just in case." To keep the girls calm, she made a game of getting ready. As the weather soured, she suggested that they collect pillows to build a fort in an interior closet. When they finished, the girls nestled in with a tablet computer, unaware of the danger, as Byrne gathered extra clothing and diapers nearby.
All the while, she kept one eye on the TV. When Smith's warning reached the news stations, the voice from the box grew more urgent. "They said an inside room wasn't sufficient for this tornado," Byrne tells TIME. What to do? Her home, like many on the hard clay plains of Oklahoma, had no basement. "So I grabbed my girls and my phone, and we went across to the street to a neighbor who had a shelter."
By now it was after 2:50 p.m. Welcomed inside the below-ground shelter with scant time to spare, the little family listened as a deafening roar passed over them, headed northeast. Afterward, Byrne emerged to find a ruined world, scented with fumes of leaking gas. "A car that had been sitting in the driveway is now in front of the house turned sideways," she says. "All the brick is pulled off from one wall. Attic has fallen in on the garage. We have a recliner in our hot tub."
For Byrne, 16 minutes meant that her girls were not cowering as their home splintered around them.
Tracy Stephen used her 16 minutes to rush from home to Plaza Towers Elementary School, hoping to retrieve her 6-year-old daughter Abigail. But when she arrived, she found the school locked tight. As the time drained away, she hurried to a neighbor's house with her two younger daughters and climbed into the cellar with just minutes to spare. The home she left behind was obliterated.