The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado by Holly Bailey Read Free Book Online

it were yesterday the way the sky had grown dark and ominous, how the air had been sticky with moisture. They recalled how the tornado had sounded, like a roaring freight train, as it indiscriminately chewed up everything in its path. They spoke of how it had smelled—like moist, tilled earth and freshly cut lumber—and how the ground had shaken as it swept through the city, a massive, dark cloud that seemed to swallow the entire sky. And when they retold the story of what it had been like on that Monday, they sometimes found it hard to breathe thinking of that sick helplessness they’d felt as it hit and after it had passed, leaving miles and miles of the city smashed to bits. They wondered how they would ever recover. But somehow they did—physically at least. And they did it again two more times after that. Still, every time thunderclouds rose up in the west aiming toward Moore, many in town wondered with a tinge of anxiety: Would this be another May 3?
     • • • 
    It was a thought that ran through Steve Eddy’s mind almost every time severe weather exploded on the landscape west of town. As city manager of Moore, a nonelected position second in power only to the mayor and the city council, Eddy was in charge of making sure the city ran smoothly. Part of his job was to anticipate disaster—or at least plan for it and do what he could to keep the city in business. On this Monday, even before the sun was up, Eddy already had the wheels in motion, preparing for the bad weather that had been forecast for days—coming on that same familiar path from the west.
    Almost every employee of the city government in Moore was on alert. The entire police and fire departments were on standby; the public works employees were ready to deploy. On the first floor of City Hall, the emergency management office had been a hive of activity all weekend, as severe storms pounded the region again and again. Just twelve hours earlier a tornado warning had been issued for Moore, but as Eddy, his deputy Stan Drake, and Gayland Kitch, the city’s emergency manager, had nervously monitored the radar and the wall-to-wall coverage on local television, the storm had stayed just to the south of town as it moved to the northeast, a narrow but fortunate miss.
    Eddy had gone to bed that night grateful his town had been spared, but he knew he’d have to go through it all again the next day. For days meteorologists at the National Weather Service had warned him and other city officials in the region that radar patterns suggested Monday’s weather could be treacherous—possibly worse than the storms that had hit on preceding days, and those had been pretty bad. On Sunday he’d watched on television as a giant stovepipe of a funnel dropped to the ground about 15 miles east of Moore. For all the study that had gone into the storms that ravaged Oklahoma, weather was still an unpredictable game of luck and chance. While meteorologists had gotten incredibly skilled at forecasting the conditions that could spawn tornadoes, it was still a mystery where and when the funnel would drop, and when it did, there was little those in its path could do except take cover or get out of the way. One shift in the wind or a tweak in any of the other mysterious components that forced a funnel to the ground and that tornado would have hit Moore, and Eddy knew it.
    As the city stirred to life outside his window, Eddy saw that the forecast hadn’t changed—in fact, it seemed to have grown worse overnight, and that concerned him. Meteorologists were forecasting that the storms would fire up in the midafternoon—not the early evening, when bad weather usually hit. He worried they could have an impact on schools, where classes didn’t let out until around 3:00 P.M. or later, and on rush-hour traffic, as residents drove home after work. Scanning his e-mail, Eddy learned from a colleague that the Weather Service had scheduled a conference call for later that morning to