Midwest towns say early storm warnings saved lives

Peo­ple exam­ine tor­nado dam­age in the Oak­lawn neigh­bor­hood Sun­day in Wichita, Kan. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Jeff Tuttle)

SEAN MURPHY

Asso­ci­ated Press

WOODWARD, Okla. — The tele­vi­sion was tuned to fore­cast­ers’ dire warn­ings of an impend­ing storm when Greg Tomlyanobich heard a short burst from a tor­nado siren blare after mid­night Sun­day. Then silence. Then rumbling.

The 52-year-old quickly grabbed his wife and grand­son, hur­ry­ing them into the emer­gency cel­lar as debris whirled around their heads at their mobile home park in north­west Okla­homa. They hud­dled inside with about 20 other peo­ple before the tor­nado — among dozens that swept across the nation’s mid­sec­tion dur­ing the week­end — roared across the ground above, rip­ping homes from their foundations.

“It scared the hell out of me,” Tomlyanobich said.

The storm killed five peo­ple, includ­ing three chil­dren, and injured more than two dozen in Wood­ward, a town about 140 miles north­west of Okla­homa City. But it was the only tor­nado that caused fatal­i­ties. Many of the touch­downs raked harm­lessly across iso­lated stretches of rural Kansas, and though com­mu­ni­ties there and in Iowa were hit, res­i­dents and offi­cials cred­ited days of urgent warn­ings from fore­cast­ers for sav­ing lives.

When Tomlyanobich emerged from the under­ground shel­ter after the storm sub­sided, he saw a scat­tered trail of destruc­tion: home insu­la­tion, sid­ing and splin­tered wood where homes once stood; trees stripped of leaves, cloth­ing and metal pre­car­i­ously hang­ing from limbs.

“It just makes you sick to your stom­ach. Just look at that man­gled steel,” he said Sun­day, point­ing to what appeared to be a giant twisted steel frame that had landed in the mid­dle of the mobile home park, which is sur­rounded by rural land dot­ted with oil field equipment.

The storms were part of an excep­tion­ally strong sys­tem tracked by the National Weather Service’s Storm Pre­dic­tion Cen­ter in Nor­man, Okla., which spe­cial­izes in tor­nado fore­cast­ing. The cen­ter took the unusual step of warn­ing peo­ple more than 24 hours in advance of a pos­si­ble “high-end, life-threatening event.”

Cen­ter spokesman Chris Vac­caro said the weather ser­vice received at least 120 reports of tor­na­does by dawn Sun­day and was work­ing to con­firm how many actu­ally touched down.

The storm sys­tem was weak­en­ing as it crawled east and addi­tional tor­na­does were unlikely, though fore­cast­ers warned that strong thun­der­storms could be expected as far east as Michigan.

Wood­ward suf­fered the worst of the destruc­tion from the storms, which also struck in Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska. Wood­ward City Man­ager Alan Rif­fel said 89 homes and 13 busi­nesses were destroyed, and blood­ied sur­vivors in the 12,000-resident town emerged to find flipped cars and smashed trailers.

Retired fire­fighter Marty Logan said he spot­ted the tor­nado when it knocked down power lines, caus­ing flashes of light, and saw a radio tower’s blink­ing lights go black. He later saw a man emerge from a twisted, wrecked sport util­ity vehi­cle that had been tossed along the side of the road.

“The guy had blood com­ing down his face,” Logan said. “It was scary, because I knew it was after mid­night and a lot of peo­ple were in bed.”

The state med­ical examiner’s office iden­ti­fied the vic­tims as Frank Hob­bie and his 5-year-old and 7-year-old daugh­ters, who died when the tor­nado hit the mobile home park, and Dar­ren Juul and a 10-year-old girl who died when the home they were in a few miles away was hit. Office spokes­woman Amy Elliot said no other details were avail­able, but she said a crit­i­cally hurt child was air lifted to a Texas hospital.

Author­i­ties said a sig­nal tower for Woodward’s tor­nado sirens was struck by light­ning and hit by a tor­nado early Sun­day morn­ing. Police Chief Har­vey Ruther­ford said the tower that was sup­posed to send a repeat­ing sig­nal to the town’s tor­nado siren sys­tem was knocked out.

Con­sid­er­ing the tor­nado struck at night and the sirens were dam­aged, it was remark­able that there wasn’t a greater loss of life, Ruther­ford said. “We had the hand of God take care of us,” he said.

Frank and Treva Owens knew dan­ger­ous storms were mov­ing toward Wood­ward, and although they didn’t hear sirens, the elderly cou­ple was watch­ing TV weather reports all day.

“I heard them say we had nine min­utes and that’s when I hit the cel­lar,” Frank Ownes said, not­ing that the 12-foot by 12-foot shel­ter was prepped with their med­ica­tions, food and clothing.

Okla­homa Gov. Mary Fallin toured the area by heli­copter before walk­ing through some of the town’s hard­est hit neighborhoods.

“Get­ting the response out imme­di­ately through­out the com­mu­nity — it’s just remark­able what you have done,” Fallin told a group of emer­gency offi­cials. “Once again that empha­sizes how impor­tant it is to have a plan.”

In the tiny west­ern Iowa town of Thur­man, piles of top­pled trees lined the streets in front of homes where miss­ing walls and roofs exposed soaked liv­ing rooms. Long­time res­i­dent Ted Stafford recalled feel­ing his home shake, then hear­ing three win­dows shat­ter as the storm hit. He was amazed that no one in town was seri­ously injured.

“We’re all OK, for­tu­nately. Nobody’s hurt. We can fuel this recov­ery with beans and cof­fee,” the 54-year-old said while stand­ing on the bro­ken con­crete of what had been his home’s new base­ment foundation.

In Kansas, a reported tor­nado dam­aged McConnell Air Force Base and the Spirit AeroSys­tems and Boe­ing plants in Wichita late Sat­ur­day. Pre­lim­i­nary esti­mates sug­gest dam­ages could be as high as $283 mil­lion in the area, where the storm also top­pled a 65-foot Fer­ris wheel at a local amuse­ment park.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brown­back acknowl­edged that the dam­age could have been far worse, not­ing in an inter­view with CNN that res­i­dents appeared to have heeded safety warn­ings. “God was mer­ci­ful,” he said.

Yvonne Tucker rushed to a shel­ter with about 60 of her neigh­bors at Pinaire Mobile Home Park in Wichita. She said peo­ple were cry­ing and scream­ing, and the shelter’s lights went out when the twister hit. When they went back out­side, they found sev­eral homes destroyed, includ­ing Tucker’s.

“I didn’t think it was that bad until I walked down my street and every­thing is gone,” Tucker said. “I don’t know what to do.”

Fel­low mobile home res­i­dent Kristin Dean, who was pushed out of her home in a wheel­chair, grabbed some pos­ses­sions before going into the shel­ter, and she later learned that was all she had left. Her home was gone.

“It got still,” she said. “Then we heard a ‘wham,’ things fly­ing. Every­body screamed, hud­dling together. It is dev­as­tat­ing, but you know, we are alive.”

Posted by AP News on Apr 15 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.