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

go over what it was expecting. Although it was a routine call, he felt a twinge of dread. Eddy wished that storm season were over. Lately, bad weather wasn’t exclusive to the spring, but May was still the month when the worst seemed to roll through, the four weeks of the year he dreaded the most.
    Eddy was a realist, but there was part of him that held out hope that Moore would be lucky and that whatever storms developed would stay to the north or the south. Part of him felt guilty for even having those thoughts. Knowing firsthand how horrific storms could be, he never wanted to wish bad weather on anybody. But he couldn’t help but hope that if storms did develop, Moore would somehow be spared. His town had seen its fair share of tornadoes. It didn’t need another.
    At fifty-seven, Eddy had been working for the city government in Moore for almost half of his life. Like Simpson, he was a “lifer,” as people often refer to those who grew up in Moore and never left. While some moved away, to other cities in Oklahoma or out of the state altogether, many people in Moore stayed put, drawn in by something they couldn’t quite explain. Maybe that was why Moore still felt like a small town, even though it had transformed into a larger city over the years. Or maybe it was simply the people, how friendly they were and how resilient.
    Eddy had moved to Moore when he was in second grade, and a few people in town still called him “Stevie,” as he was known back in grade school. Moore was barely a blip on the map when he and his parents arrived in town in the early 1960s, drawn by the ability to buy a nice house cheaply and the quiet allure of suburban life. As a child, Eddy had watched the new city slowly rise up around him, with new buildings, new schools, new homes, and a flood of new residents. In a single decade the population had jumped from a little under two thousand residents in 1960 to nearly nineteen thousand in 1970, a surge driven by an influx of families who liked the idea of living in a small town, but one that was still an easy commute to Oklahoma City and to the region’s other major employers—including the University of Oklahoma in nearby Norman and Tinker Air Force Base in Midwest City. But like other parts of Oklahoma, Moore was hard hit when the bottom suddenly fell out of the surging energy market in the early 1980s. It was the worst economic hit in Oklahoma since the days of the Great Depression, and tens of thousands of people lost their jobs in a matter of months, including many in Moore. The tiny suburb, once booming, suddenly went stagnant as businesses closed and some residents were forced to move to other states to look for work. But Eddy never gave up on his hometown.
    Watching Moore rise and evolve around him as a child had made Eddy dream about helping to run a city someday, and when he came back to his hometown after college, he began working his way up through City Hall. In many ways it was a dream job for him. It wasn’t just a career. It was personal. He was serving the town he loved, helping it grow into the thriving city he’d always known it could be. He’d always known that the weather would be a factor in the job. The city had been battered by severe storms for as long as he could remember—windstorms that uprooted trees and torrential rains that caused flooding in parts of town. The tornado sirens had gone off once or twice when he was growing up, but nothing serious had ever hit, just a tiny spout here and there. Some in town still talked about a tiny funnel that had touched down on the football field at Moore High School during a practice one afternoon in the late 1960s—a slender funnel that slunk down from the dark clouds above and zipped back up so quickly some wondered if what they’d witnessed had really happened.
    Like the managers of other cities in central Oklahoma, Eddy and his colleagues had planned for a tornado—contemplating how the city would respond if one ever