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

hit. But Eddy never imagined, not even once, how terrible and devastating the storms that began to roll through Moore would be.
    Eddy was assistant city manager when the first big tornado hit in October 1998—ripping off roofs and knocking down fences as it moved north along Santa Fe Avenue on the city’s west side. Compared with the storms since, that twister was nothing—a third of a mile wide, with winds measured at about 100 miles per hour. But every tornado, no matter its size, is dangerous, and he remembered how worried he had been for the people of his town as he watched the storm develop. He never imagined that only seven months later Moore would be in the crosshairs of another tornado, a funnel more than three times the size that would go down as one of the most destructive in history. Like others in Moore, Eddy had a vivid memory of that night, the terrible shock he felt as he stood in the middle of one of those flattened neighborhoods looking at unimaginable destruction as far as the eye could see.
    By then Eddy was widely regarded around the city as a calm and steady hand in tense moments, exactly the kind of person you wanted in charge when the bad times hit. Quiet and matter-of-fact, he was not someone who felt the need to talk when words didn’t need to be spoken. He wasn’t someone who got “excitable,” as he often put it. Like many Oklahomans, he didn’t spend time debating why the storms had happened. Eddy saw his job as keeping the city going, no matter what had happened. He was determined to act quickly and get things back on track. But even he couldn’t help but be stunned by the enormity of the May 3 storm. While he was outwardly calm and collected, Eddy’s mind raced with questions, and though he didn’t dare voice them, he had doubts just as everyone did about what the storm meant for his city’s future. How could they recover? How would they deal with all this debris? Millions of tons of destroyed houses and the evidence of the lives within them blown across town by the most ruthless storm he’d ever known. Where would they even begin?
    Put in charge of overseeing the city’s cleanup, Eddy filed his doubts away and got to work. It was what he had been hired to do, and the people around him did the same, eager to restore what sense of normalcy they could. Within three weeks the city had hired an outside contractor to begin carting the debris away. And mindful that other storms could hit, Moore city officials, at Eddy’s urging, approved a preexisting contract with the same company for future storms, so that the city could get to the task of rebuilding far more quickly if something like this were to happen again. “Nothing good happens until all of that crap is gone,” Eddy bluntly told his colleagues. It turned out to be an incredibly insightful decision—as more storms followed. Suddenly, government officials from all over the country descended on Moore, this tiny little town that few people had ever heard of, to study how Eddy and his colleagues had helped their city bounce back. Eddy took it all in stride. “We were just doing our jobs,” he told people. He wasn’t being modest. It was what he really believed.
    Over the years, Eddy, who ascended to city manager a few months after the May 3 tornado, came to be regarded across the country as a leading expert on how to respond to tornadoes. Many were specific tasks that could be replicated, but some things simply couldn’t—including the attitude of people in Moore. Outsiders marveled at the town’s resilience, but to Eddy that was simply the way people here were, the way they had been raised. If you were knocked down, you got back up. It was what you did. But he did acknowledge the small-town nature of Moore had helped in the darkest days.
    Some of the relationships between people at City Hall dated back decades, to long before they worked for the government. Eddy had known Glenn Lewis, the mayor, and Stan Drake, the assistant