Search for survivors after massive Oklahoma tornado
The search for survivors is underway after a two mile-wide tornado tore through Oklahoma City, trapping victims beneath rubble and flattening a school.
The ferocious Oklahoma tornado arrived with only 16 minutes notice and resulted in at least 24 deaths, nine of them children.
Another 240 people were injured, including 60 children. There were also 101 people pulled alive from the rubble after one of the most devastating tornados in US history, and there are believed to be others trapped beneath debris.
Five schools were hit. At one of them, Plaza Towers primary, seven chilldren died, but others were more fortunate. “They literally were lifting walls up and kids were coming out,” said police sergeant Jeremy Lewis. “They pulled kids from under cinder blocks without a scratch on them.”
One of those who pitched in with the rescue effort was Madi Alexander, a journalism student. She told Channel 4 News: “I walked out of my house, cleared the debris out in front of my house, and people were saying the houses north are just gone.
“So I walked that way and the first responders were still going through the neighbourhoods. So we walked through and we kept yelling hello. And we could hear people yelling back… so I helped pull some people out, and then some animals.”
Resident Ricky Stove said: “We thought we died because we were inside the cellar door. It ripped open the door and just glass and debris started slamming on us and we thought we were dead to be honest.”
President Barack Obama paid his repects to victims of the tornado, saying: “The people of Moore should know that their country will remain on the ground, there for them, beside them, as long as it takes.”
‘Debris field’
“The whole city looks like a debris field,” Glenn Lewis, the mayor of Moore, told reporters.
“It looks like we have lost our hospital. I drove by there a while ago and it’s pretty much destroyed.”
Weather experts said it was the second most powerful category of tornado with winds up to 200 mph (320 kph).
Local media measured the tornado at more than two miles (3 km) wide, with images showing entire neighbourhoods flattened.
The storm struck at the height of tornado season and more are forecast. On Sunday, tornados killed two people and injured 39, also in Oklahoma.
Life in Tornado Alley
The town of Moore is not unused to tornados. It is, after all, in an area known as Tornado Alley.
So much so that school children take part in tornado drills in the same way that other have fire drills.
As part of these drills, the students at Plaza Towers primary school were told to go to the main hallway, which is where they were when the tornado hit. But despite following procedures, a rescue worker told Fox News that the roof collapsed on top of the children and may have brought down water lines causing the children to drown.
Storm shelters are also frequent in Moore, and rescue workers are concerned that some families may be trapped in their shelters by the sheer amount of debris piled on top of them. In fact there is so much heavy debris that it is not obvious where they are located.
See @google crisis response map for #Oklahoma #Tornado google.org/crisismap/2013â?¦
— Storyful (@Storyful) May 20, 2013
“Our hearts are just broken for the parents” trying to find out the fate of their children, Gov. Mary Fallin said: usat.ly/12I5OPA
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) May 21, 2013
Tornado rips trough Oklahoma with wind speeds over 250 miles per hour on Monday, May 20, 2013 #EarthPics twitter.com/GoogleEarthPicâ?¦
— Google Earth Pics (@GoogleEarthPics) May 21, 2013
‘Please find the children’
Facebook and Twitter have been flooded with messages from around the country including one pleading simply: “Please find those little children.”
One survivor was seven-year old schoolgirl Isabella Rojas.
She said: “When the lights went of we were doing some reading and then we went under the desks. I was so afraid that I was hanging onto one of the desks and then I fell back. I really got stuck because all the desks were on top of us and the reacher got stuck so no one had a helper because the desk was on her leg.”
Dog found in rubble
Video of a woman being reunited with her lost dog has gone viral around the world.
Barbara Garcia thought the pet had perished in the storm. The dog’s head was then spotted among the metal and debris, before being pulled to safety.
She said: “Well I thought God just answered one prayer to let me be OK, but he answered both of them, because this was my second prayer.”