Destructive tornado outbreaks like May 3 not uncommon

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- The last time a tornado hit Moore, Jason Reed was racing to his parents' house, staring a funnel cloud down in his rearview mirror.<br><br>When the twister had passed, Reed returned

Sunday, May 2nd 2004, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- The last time a tornado hit Moore, Jason Reed was racing to his parents' house, staring a funnel cloud down in his rearview mirror.

When the twister had passed, Reed returned home to find his dog buried under debris, but unscathed. The residence he rented from his parents didn't fare so well.

Like many houses on Janeway Street, this was the second twister to hit and the tornado that made some homes unlivable.

While Reed's home sustained roof damage in the May 3, 1999, tornado that destroyed 850 homes, the house was leveled in last year's May 8 outbreak.

A year later, the place where their home once stood is empty. Rebuilding a home there isn't an option.

"We'll probably just sell the lot," said Reed, 29, a logistics management officer at Tinker Air Force Base. "It's just an investment at this point."

Nobody knows if the state will go through the kind of destructive twisters it saw five years ago and again last year, but Oklahoma's unique position in the central United States makes it a prime location.

"If we look at long-term averages, when's the most likely big tornado to occur?" asked Harold Brooks, a research meteorologist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman.

If it were to occur, "The most likely significant tornado in the United States is May 2 (of any year) just south of Oklahoma City, maybe somewhere between Pauls Valley and Oklahoma City."

The collision between cold, dry air from the north and warm, moist air from the south that causes storms that produce tornadoes is at its peak in early May, Brooks said. The upper-air pattern over Oklahoma is favorable for development of such storms, he adds.

Five years ago, those conditions came together near Lawton, producing a brief tornadoes before maturing into a huge twister that remained on the ground for dozens of miles.

It sucked up trees, power lines, outbuildings and cars. It left deadly, destructive marks on Bridge Creek in Grady County, Chickasha, Moore, Del City, Midwest City and the northeastern tip of Oklahoma City.

That wasn't the only storm that night. Other large tornadoes swept through Mulhall, Dover, Perry and Stroud.

Forty-four people died in the storms.

Just seven months earlier, a smaller outbreak took a similar path through Moore, and last May 8, another tornado did major damage in Moore.

"The fact that we've ended up having a couple of tornadoes that have followed very close to the same path, I think there's an important distinction to make: close to the same path and the same path aren't the same thing," Brooks said.

The probability of a tornado striking the same place twice can be likened to tossing a coin a million times and getting heads 10 times in a row.

"If you start your analysis at the beginning of the 10th head in a row, you think 'this coin must not be fair,"' he said. "If you look at it in the long run, eventually it's going to change.

"I think Moore is, especially, going through their 10 coin flips."

Brooks said the May 3 tornadoes were not unusual meteorologically, but the storms did teach him about how Oklahomans responded.

No one between the ages of 4 and 23 died in the May 1999 storms. Brooks thinks the young people have been taught what to do in the event of a tornado and have, in turn, taught their parents.

Meteorologists also learned how deadly taking shelter under bridges and highway overpasses is -- three people who did so died, Brooks said.

The small community of Bridge Creek -- near Blanchard, southwest of Oklahoma City -- suffered disproportionate losses. Twelve residents died, the schools shut down for the last 17 days of the semester and relief aid poured in.

Grady County Sheriff Kieran McMullen remembers a mile of land between the fire department and a school that looked like a freshly plowed field after a tornado ripped up the grass.

Bridge Creek Elementary School Principal Kay Norman remembers the asphalt of the roads being torn up in the same way.

"I've lived in Oklahoma all my life," Norman, 59, said. "I've never seen such sheer devastation."

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Guard and other groups set up a control center at the elementary school.

They distributed supplies to clean up the town and hot meals cooked in the school's cafeteria. One family even lived in the school until the end of the summer, using cots set up in a classroom and showers in the locker room, Norman said.

McMullen remembers a different scene from the night of May 3.

What struck him was the number of organizations -- ambulance services and police, fire and sheriff's departments -- that worked together.

Since then, McMullen has become sheriff and has helped make sure the county's communications system would not go down if more tornadoes hit.

The sheriff's department increased its number of volunteer reserve deputies from about 12 in 1999 to 47 currently. The county also gathered a group of ham radio operators who would be able to help with communication in case of a disaster.

"We need to be sure any single strike anywhere in the county doesn't affect the county's ability to respond," McMullen said.

The Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management gave about $5.4 million in grants to uninsured and underinsured families throughout the state after the May 3 tornadoes.

FEMA gave out $93.1 million to help individuals, pay for emergency work by other government agencies, rebuild public infrastructure and build safe rooms. Comparatively, FEMA has given $14 million in assistance so far for the May 8, 2003, tornado and one that occurred the next day and damaged homes and a school in northeast Oklahoma City.

Oklahomans had $955 million in insured losses from the 1999 tornadoes and about $100 million in losses from last year's twisters, according to the state Insurance Department.

As for Reed, having a home that stood in the path of two destructive storms isn't going to keep him, his wife and their two infant twin sons from making Moore their home.

"I couldn't imagine living anywhere else. This is my home," Reed said.

"No matter where you live there's going to be some kind of natural disaster, whether it's a hurricane or an earthquake or something else."