Rescuers comb Oklahoma rubble for survivors

Attention focus on huge cleanup job

members of the National Guard were changing shifts to work through the night.

The death toll of 24 was lower than initially feared, but nine children were among the dead, including seven who died at Plaza Towers Elementary School which took a direct hit by the deadliest tornado to strike the United States in two years. Emergency workers pulled more than 100 survivors from the debris of homes, schools and a hospital after the tornado ripped through the Oklahoma City region with winds exceeding 200 miles per hour (320 kph), leaving a trail of destruction 17 miles (23 km) long and 1.3 miles (2 km) wide.

Plaza Towers Elementary was one of five schools in its path. “They (rescuers) literally were lifting walls up and kids were coming out,” Oklahoma State Police Sergeant Jeremy Lewis said. “They pulled kids out from under cinder blocks without a scratch on them.”The last time a giant twister tore through the area, on May 3, 1999, it killed more than 40 people and destroyed thousands of homes. That tornado also ranked as an EF5.

While Oklahoma Emergency Management’s Lojka said a flyover of the affected area on Tuesday showed 2,400 homes damaged or obliterated, with an estimated 10,000 people affected, the death toll was lower than might have been expected. The toll was also a fraction of that of the 2011 twister in Joplin, Missouri, which killed 161 people.

In the hours following the storm, many more people were feared dead. At one point, the Oklahoma state medical examiner’s office said the toll could rise as high as 91, but on Tuesday officials said 24 bodies had been recovered, down from a previous tally of 51. “There was a lot of chaos,” said Amy Elliott, chief administrative officer for the medical examiner. Some ascribe the relatively low number of dead residents discovered in Moore, home to 55,000 people, to the fact many locals have small“storm safe”shelters, basically a concrete hole in the garage floor with a sliding roof that locks. Billy McElrath, 50, of Oklahoma City, said his wife hid in a storm safe in their garage when the tornado hit. She emerged unhurt even though the storm destroyed the 1968 Corvette convertible she had bought him as a birthday present, and crushed a motorcycle. “Everything else is just trashed,”he said as he loaded a pickup with salvaged goods.

Kraig Boozier, 47, took to his own small shelter in the Westmoor subdivision of Oklahoma City and watched in shock as a fan in the wall was ripped out.

“I looked up and saw the tornado above me,” he said. When he came out after the storm, he helped a neighbor who had emerged from her own shelter move a car that was blocking the entrance to another neighbor’s shelter.

Officials said another factor behind the surprisingly low death toll was the early warning, with meteorologists saying days in advance that a storm system was forming.

Once a tornado was forming, people had 15 to 20 minutes of warning, which meant they could take shelter or flee the projected path. The weather service also has new, sterner warnings about deadly tornadoes to get people’s attention. —Reuters