(3 of 5)
Inside those locked school doors, the teachers and staff at Plaza Towers filled their 16 minutes purposefully executing the plans they had rehearsed again and again. Schools built in Moore after the 1999 tornado include safe rooms, but older schools like Plaza Towers and nearby Briarwood Elementary do not. So the students filed into the innermost part of the school, away from the windows, knelt and covered their heads. As the storm hit, courageous teachers and staff shielded the children with their bodies.
When it subsided, Stephen made for the ruins "like a crazy person, running toward the wreckage, wailing," she said. A mother of a classmate told her that Abigail had been killed in the collapse--a horrific mistake, it turned out, one of many in the tornado's chaotic aftermath. She found her daughter in a nearby home, wrapped safely in a blanket. The teacher's aide who had protected Abigail was injured but alive.
Patrick Smith's 16 minutes were spent gathering his two kids from school and outracing the twister to his rented house on 19th and Moore. "The tornado seemed to chase me all the way," he recalls. There was just enough time to load the children into the bathtub and hit the deck beside them with a mattress over his head. "I love you," he called over the racket of debris battering the walls.
When it was over, he ran the two blocks to Plaza Towers Elementary with neighbors in tow. The scene was a human chain of first responders, working together to dig out children and teachers. As they were freed, recalls Sue Ogrocki, a photographer for the Associated Press, they were passed down the row to safety, a fireman at the end of the line handing each one to a thankful parent.
"I couldn't hear the children," Ogrocki says, "and every now and then, police or fire would ask people to stay quiet so they could listen for the kids still trapped."
The kids were trapped under what had been school walls when the bell rang that morning. Adrenaline surging, Smith felt "like Hercules all of a sudden" as he and his neighbors "picked up an entire wall." Underneath they found "17 kids in the debris that we dug out." The children were too frightened to look up, he says.
Other children would never look up. Ten children were among the dead, seven of them at Plaza Towers. Six adults are still missing. In all, searchers had found 24 bodies as of May 22 in the scarred trail of the tornado, which was more than a mile wide in some places and had skidded across the south side of Oklahoma City for some 17 miles. On the Enhanced Fujita scale used to classify the strength of cyclones, the storm rated a 5: as high as it goes, with peak winds topping 200 m.p.h. and some buildings stripped to bare foundations.