IT WAS heartbreaking to see how a community in Moore, Oklahoma was reduced to rubble after it was hit by a powerful tornado on Monday.
measuring top-of-the-scale EF5, with winds of more than 200 miles per hour.
The tornado killed 24 people and injured more than 120. It also caused $2 billion in damages, and destroyed up to 13,000 homes.
Balitang America Correspondent Steve Angeles reported about a Filipino-American family who was fortunate to have survived the Oklahoma tornado. The Blaskie family hid in their underground shelter for two hours, as the tornado hit.
But a family member, 24-year-old Rebecca, was then working at that time. For nearly two hours, the Fil-Am bank assistant manager feared for her life. Just before the tornado hit, Rebecca and her co-workers hid underneath a neighboring building.
“I was on the ground covering in the dark and then you hear this loud rumble this roar and the whistling and I don’t know if the door swing open to the top of the basement, there were papers swirling around you hear this loud whistling the swirling, but the worse thing, people just started screaming and crying out. I thought the worst was happening. I thought we were going to be sucked out of this basement (sic),” Rebecca told Balitang America.
Because tornadoes frequent the state, many homes are built with underground shelters. But with the topography and geology of many areas like Moore, not all families can afford to have these shelters.
This Fil-Am family was among those, who were fortunate to have one. The Blaskies have a 4-foot long, 6-foot wide shelter buried some 5 feet into the ground.
Rebecca’s Filipino fiancé Lenin Glass, her parents and three siblings huddled up, monitoring Monday’s tornado and not knowing if Rebecca was somewhere safe.
Fortunately, only a few pieces of debris went into their backyard. The tornado had miraculously skipped their neighborhood.
“I was terrified knowing it was going to pass by my fiancée. That moment, you just don’t know what to think (sic),” said Glass.
As Angeles reported, the shopping center where Rebecca’s bank was, was left in ruins. Several people in her building who were unable to find shelter had to be dug out of the rubble.
Glass’s jeep was among the heap of cars scattered along the highway, where Monday’s tornado hit the hardest.
“My house is okay. I have friends, they lost their houses, there’s nothing left in their house that can be replaced. I’m glad they’re okay. That’s why that night I was trying to go to sleep. I couldn’t just [stop] thinking about what could’ve happened,” he said.
Moore residents are still thankful that many lives were spared, despite the magnitude and strength of the twister.
As Time Magazine reported, there were only 16 pivotal minutes between the time the sirens first alerted Moore residents and when the tornado touched down.
It was unfortunate that two elementary schools were directly hit by the tornado and most of the children who died were in these schools. The schools did not have shelters to protect the kids and many people were asking why that was so.
As CBS News reported: there is no state law in Oklahoma requiring schools to have safe rooms or tornado shelters in schools, despite the increased risk of tornadoes there.
Presently, in the event of a tornado, Oklahoma schools instruct children to take cover in bathrooms or hallways. This was what school officials did when the twister hit last Monday.
However, according to Oklahoma’s Insurance Commissioner John Doak, hallways can’t protect against the strongest storms.
Oklahoma’s Director of Emergency Management Albert Ashwood explained that they have built safe rooms in about 100 schools but that the cost was so high.
“Most of these projects have been between $600,000 to $1 million and usually applied to brand new construction of new schools,” Ashwood said.
Moore’s mayor, Glen Lewis said that after a 300 mph tornado ravaged through Moore in 1999, local building codes were tightened to require stronger metal clamps to secure roofs on houses.
Mayor Lewis pointed out that 2,000 shelters were built in private homes but he didn’t believe it was necessary to require them — until now.
“Who thought we would have an EF5 tornado happen in same place twice,? We’re just hoping it doesn’t happen again,” he said.
Just how common are EF5 in the history of violent tornadoes in the United States? Washington Post reported that only about 0.1 percent of all tornadoes are EF5s.
According to the National Climatic Data Center: “On average, over 1,000 tornadoes hit the US each year. 20 can be expected to be violent and possibly one might be incredible (EF5).”
Helen Grant, a mother of two students who went to one of the schools, told CBS News that money should not be an excuse and that state officials should be proactive in preventing the loss of lives during worst-case scenarios.
“I don’t think you can put a price on human life,” Grant said, echoing the sentiments of many parents in Moore and elsewhere in the nation.
“And even if the storm doesn’t hit your town in the next 20 years, you’re making an investment in the children of the future.”
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Gel Santos Relos is the anchor of TFC’s “Balitang America.” Views and opinions expressed by the author in this column are are solely those of the author and not of Asian Journal and ABS-CBN-TFC. For comments, go to www.TheFil-AmPerspective.com, https://www.facebook.com/Gel.Santos.Relos
