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The cyclone was arbitrary. Within yards of a house in matchsticks, one could find a china cabinet undisturbed, every fragile plate intact. Sweeping up whole lives and dropping the shreds at random, it reminded thousands of people what really mattered. Sam Riojas found himself hunting through the rubble for an old tin box. "My grandfather died in October, which was pretty tough, and I found out that he used to be in the military in Mexico. He didn't tell anyone in our family. None of us knew. We're looking for stuff he had collected." A precious needle in a vast haystack of other people's memories. "I can't find it," he says wearily.
A day later, Kelly Byrne reflects, "If you've never been through one, you don't realize how quickly it happens. We had enough warning. We had a good 15-minute warning, which is an amazing time for a tornado." Sixteen, to be exact. "But when there are cars flying through the air, and trees and parts of houses, there's only so much you can do to hide from it."
Her brother-in-law Mike was at work in Norman when the storm went through. When he reached the place where his home used to be, "I didn't even really know it was my street," he says. What he found, in that dismal chaos, was the bedrock truth of the whole awful story, the one fact that every human response must bend to accommodate. "Tornadoes do whatever the hell they want," he says.
Vulnerable Safety Net
Two years ago, near suppertime on may 22, 2011, a force-5 tornado dropped suddenly on Joplin, Mo., and left at least 158 people dead--more than six times the number of fatalities in Moore. The most important difference between that disaster and this one was the effectiveness of the advance warning.
In sounding the alarm on Monday, Rick Smith relied on a flood of signals unimaginable when President Ulysses Grant founded the Weather Service in 1870. The U.S. has up to 30 satellites at any given moment that spend at least part of their time gazing down on weather patterns. It has 122 Doppler radar systems scattered across the country to look up from the ground. There are 114 climate-data centers to monitor every region of the country. And the computers that process this information were recently upgraded to increase their data-crunching power thirtyfold, at a cost to taxpayers of $25 million.
But this weather-forecasting infrastructure is much more wobbly than it seems, and without attention the whole thing could start to come undone. Last October, in the run-up to Hurricane Sandy, one of the feds' two vital weather satellites--known as GOES-East--went briefly off-line, effectively blinding the nation's forecasters when they needed eyes the most. A patch was rigged using a backup satellite and some data from European governments. It happened again two days after the Moore disaster: GOES-East went on the blink. With GOES-West and other U.S. weather satellites also nearing the end of their lifespan, these failures offer a harrowing glimpse of the price we'll pay if we don't invest in the next generation of weather-watching technology.