OKLAHOMA CITY The Oklahoma state medical
examiner's office says 20 children are among the dead in the tornado
that ripped through Oklahoma City suburbs.
The twister killed at least 51 people, and officials fear the death toll will rise.
Medical examiner spokeswoman Amy Elliott confirmed the children's deaths Monday night.
The
tornado made a direct hit on an elementary school in Moore, Okla., and
authorities were seen pulling children alive from the rubble.
Oklahoma
City police say the search and rescue operation at the school is now a
recovery effort. Authorities are still searching for victims -- and
survivors -- throughout the community.
The monstrous tornado was at least a half-mile wide. It flattened
entire neighborhoods and destroyed the elementary school as children and
teachers huddled against winds of up to 200 mph.
The
storm laid waste to scores of buildings in Moore, a community of 41,000
people about 10 miles south of the city. Block after block lay in ruins.
Homes were crushed into piles of broken wood. Cars and trucks were left
crumpled on the roadside.
The National Weather Service issued an initial finding that the
tornado was an EF-4 on the enhanced Fujita scale, the second
most-powerful type of twister.
176 people were being
treated at hospitals, including dozens of children. Search-and-rescue
efforts were to continue throughout the night.
Tiffany Thronesberry said she heard from her mother, Barbara Jarrell, shortly after the tornado.
"I got a phone call from her screaming, 'Help! Help! I can't breathe. My house is on top of me!"' Thronesberry said.
Thronesberry hurried to her mother's house, where first
responders had already pulled her out. Her mother was hospitalized for
treatment of cuts and bruises.
Rescuers launched a
desperate rescue effort at the school, pulling children from heaps of
debris and carrying them to a triage center.
Oklahoma
Gov. Mary Fallin deployed 80 National Guard members to assist with
rescue operations and activated extra highway patrol officers.
Fallin
also spoke with President Obama, who declared a major disaster and
ordered federal aid to supplement state and local recovery efforts.
Many land lines to stricken areas were down, and cell phone networks
were congested. The storm was so massive that it will take time to
establish communications between rescuers and state officials, the
governor said.
In videos of the storm, the dark funnel
cloud could be seen marching slowly across the green landscape. As it
churned through the community, the twister scattered shards of wood,
awnings and glass all over the streets.
The tornado also
destroyed the community hospital and some retail stores. Moore Mayor
Glenn Lewis watched it pass through from his jewelry shop.
"All of my employees were in the vault," Lewis said.
Chris Calvert saw the menacing cloud approaching from about a mile away.
"I
was close enough to hear it," he said. "It was just a low roar, and you
could see the debris, like pieces of shingles and insulation and stuff
like that, rotating around it."
Even though his subdivision is a mile from the tornado's path, it was
still covered with debris. He found a picture of a small girl on Santa
Claus' lap in his yard.
Volunteers and first responders raced to search the debris for survivors.
At
Plaza Towers Elementary School, the storm tore off the roof, knocked
down walls and turned the playground into a mass of twisted plastic and
metal.
Children from the school were among the dead, but
several students were pulled alive from the rubble. Rescue workers
passed the survivors down a human chain to the triage center in the
parking lot.
James Rushing, who lives across the street
from the school, heard reports of the approaching twister and ran to the
school, where his 5-year-old foster son, Aiden, attends classes.
Rushing believed he would be safer there.
"About two minutes after I got there, the school started coming apart," he said.
The students were sent into the restroom.
A man
with a megaphone stood Monday evening near St. Andrews United Methodist
Church and called out the names of surviving children. Parents waited
nearby, hoping to hear their sons' and daughters' names.
Don
Denton hadn't heard from his two sons since the tornado hit the town,
but the man who has endured six back surgeries and walks with a severe
limp said he walked about two miles as he searched for them.
As reports of the storm came in, Denton's 16-year-old texted him, telling him to call.
"I was trying to call him, and I couldn't get through," Denton said.
Eventually,
Denton said, his sons spotted him in the crowd. They were fine, but
upset to hear that their grandparents' home was destroyed.
As dusk began to fall, heavy equipment was rolled up to the
school, and emergency workers wearing yellow crawled among the ruins.
Because
the ground was muddy, bulldozers and front-end loaders were getting
stuck. Crews used jackhammers and sledgehammers to tear away concrete,
and chunks were being thrown to the side as the workers dug.
Douglas Sherman drove two blocks from his home to help.
"Just having those kids trapped in that school, that really turns the table on a lot of things," he said.
A
map provided by the National Weather Service showed that the storm
began west of Newcastle and crossed the Canadian River into Oklahoma
City's rural far southwestern side about 3 p.m. local time When it
reached Moore, the twister cut a path through the center of town before
lifting back into the sky at Lake Stanley Draper.
Oklahoma City Police Capt. Dexter Nelson said downed power lines and open gas lines posed a risk in the aftermath of the system.
Monday's powerful tornado loosely followed the path of a killer twister that slammed the region in May 1999.
The weather service estimated that Monday's tornado was at least a half-mile wide. The 1999 storm had winds clocked at 300 mph.
Kelsey
Angle, a weather service meteorologist in Kansas City, Mo., said it's
unusual for two such powerful tornadoes to track roughly the same path.
It was the fourth tornado to hit Moore since 1998. A twister also struck in 2003.
Lewis, who was also mayor during the 1999 storm, said the city was already at work on the recovery.
"We've
already started printing the street signs. It took 61 days to clean up
after the 1999 tornado. We had a lot of help then. We've got a lot of
help now."
Monday's devastation in Oklahoma came almost
exactly two years after an enormous twister ripped through the city of
Joplin, Mo., killing 158 people and injuring hundreds more.
That
May 22, 2011, tornado was the deadliest in the United States since
modern tornado record keeping began in 1950, according to the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Before Joplin, the deadliest
modern tornado was June 1953 in Flint, Mich., when 116 people died,
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