At the end of the day on Monday, on the last week of the school year, students at Plaza Towers Elementary in this blue-collar suburb were zipping their backpacks. A fifth-grade class had just finished watching a movie about a boy who survives a crash-landing in the Canadian wilderness. Then the sirens started to wail.
Claire Gossett’s teacher hurried the class into the hallway, then into a bathroom as a tornado that was more than a mile wide drew closer. Claire, 11, crammed into a stall with six other girls. They held onto each other. The sirens wailed two, three, four times.
Echo Mackey, crouched in a hallway with her son, Logan, recalled, “I heard someone say, ‘It’s about to hit us,’ and then the power went out.”
The mountain of rubble that was once Plaza Towers Elementary School has become the emotional and physical focal point of one of the most destructive tornadoes to strike Oklahoma. Although the casualty toll fluctuated wildly early on, officials said on Tuesday that at least 24 people had died, including 9 children, 7 of them at Plaza Towers.
Throughout the 500-student school, teachers and parents had shielded students and crammed into closets and anywhere else they could squeeze as the tornado bore down. Then school windows were smashed and the ceiling ripped away, showering the students with glass, wood and pieces of insulation. “I couldn’t hear anything but people screaming and crying,” Claire said. “It felt like the school was just flying.”
The tornado swirled out of a fast-developing storm that began cutting a destructive path through Moore and other sections of the southern Oklahoma City suburbs on Monday about 2:45 p.m. It plowed through 17 miles of ground over 50 minutes, damaging or destroying hundreds of homes, businesses, schools and hospitals in Moore and in Oklahoma City itself. Winds reached speeds of up to 210 miles per hour, and many structures were wiped clean to their foundations.
Severe weather has become an almost routine part of life in Oklahoma City and its suburbs, a section of Middle America where the lore of twisters and thunderstorms has long been embraced and at times even celebrated. The National Basketball Association team is called the Thunder, and there is an annual National Weather Festival, where families gather for weather balloon launchings and storm-chaser car shows. But the 1.3-mile-wide tornado that struck Plaza Towers on Monday stunned Oklahomans, in both its size and the number of victims, dozens of whom were students who were killed or injured.
At a news conference on Tuesday in the lobby of Moore City Hall, which was running on generators because of a widespread power failure, Gov. Mary Fallin said she took an aerial tour of the tornado’s path and inspected the damage by car and on foot. She said she was left speechless. “There’s just sticks and bricks, basically,” she said, adding, “It was very surreal coming upon the school because there was no school. There was just debris.”
Officials said it was still too early to say precisely how many people had been killed, but the toll appeared to be significantly less than initially feared. State officials lowered the death toll to at least 24, down from their estimate late Monday night of nearly 100 fatalities. One reason for the uncertainty was that officials believed that some bodies might have been taken to local funeral homes instead of the state medical examiner’s office, which was doing the official count. But it appeared that the 48 people who were believed to be missing on Monday night — and were feared dead — had been found. More than 200 were injured, including 70 children.
The confusion only added to the unease. As officials spoke at City Hall, heavy rain and booms of thunder could be heard, severe weather that had periodically delayed rescuers and those assessing the damage throughout the day.
President Obama, who declared a federal disaster in five Oklahoma counties, said Tuesday at the White House that the tornado had been “one of the most destructive in history,” and that he had informed aides that “Oklahoma needs to get everything it needs right away.” He said Federal Emergency Management Agency officials had been dispatched to aid in the recovery.
“For all those who’ve been affected, we recognize that you face a long road ahead,” Mr. Obama said. “In some cases, there will be enormous grief that has to be absorbed. But you will not travel that path alone.”
After surveying the wreckage in Moore, officials at the National Weather Service upgraded its assessment of the twister’s power to Category 5 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, which measures tornado strength on a scale of zero to 5, with 5 being the most destructive. It touched down at 2:45 p.m. about four and a half miles west of Newcastle, to the west of Moore, and ended at 3:35 p.m., almost five miles east of the city, weather officials said.
Moore, with a population of 55,000, is a suburban city 11 miles south of downtown Oklahoma City. It is the home of the country music star Toby Keith, as the giant letters declare on a white silo off Interstate 35. Parents and residents questioned whether Plaza Towers Elementary — a 47-year-old public school whose students range from pre-kindergartners to sixth graders — was the safest place for the children to seek shelter.
Albert Ashwood, director of the State Department of Emergency Management, said the two schools that were hard hit — Plaza Towers in Moore and Briarwood Elementary in Oklahoma City — did not have safe rooms because the appropriate state financing had not been sought. The presence of safe rooms, he said, did “not necessarily” mean that more students would have survived, but it is a “mitigating” factor. “This was a very unique tornado,” he said.
Despite being in a region prone to tornadoes — and being heavily damaged by one in 1999 — the City of Moore, according to its Web site, has no ordinance requiring storm safe rooms in public or private buildings, and the city itself lacks a community shelter. Plaza Towers had no underground shelter. A state lawmaker whose district includes Moore, Representative Mark McBride, said the deaths should force an examination of whether schools in Oklahoma should be required to have storm shelters.
Susan Pierce, the superintendent of the Moore school district, told reporters at the news conference that safety was the district’s top priority. School administrators and staff members put a crisis plan into action on Monday and monitored the weather throughout the day, she said. “With very little notice we implemented our tornado shelter procedures at every school site,” she said.
Ms. Pierce said the state requires schools to perform tornado drills, and the district has exceeded that requirement. “We’re in the process of learning as much as we can about what has happened, and we are reviewing our emergency procedures today,” she said.
Ms. Mackey, the parent who crouched in the hall as the tornado struck, said she had gone to Plaza Towers as the sky turned dark, saying she had wanted to be with her son when the storm hit. She concluded that the school was not equipped to shelter dozens of children from the raw power of an Oklahoma twister.
“There’s no question in my mind that that school was not safe enough,” she said.
Late Monday afternoon, as the skies darkened, numerous parents rushed to the school. Some decided to seek shelter with their children. Others had enough time to flee, which may have prevented more casualties.
Jennifer Doan, a Plaza Towers teacher who is eight weeks pregnant, waited anxiously in a hallway with 11 of her third-grade students who had not yet been picked up by their parents. An announcement blared over the intercom that the tornado was upon them, and Ms. Doan, 30, quickly wrapped several of her students in her arms. The walls suddenly caved in, she told her boyfriend, Nyle Rogers
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