Tornadoes in the Time of Twitter

It's now been two weeks since my hometown of Woodward, Oklahoma, was hit by a tornado. It was a weekend when - for the second time ever - the National Weather Service issued tornado warnings more than 24 hours in advance, this time for Oklahoma, Kansas, and other Plains states. Friday afternoon a tornado hit near Norman, and that was just the beginning. All day Saturday storms were moving through Oklahoma and Kansas; we had the Weather Channel on, and I kept seeing the parts of the map that included towns where I used to live. When I went to bed, it seemed like Woodward might have dodged the bullet in spite of multiple tornadoes being spotted in the county, but on Sunday morning when I got up, there was the news that Woodward had been hit.

It was just after midnight. Most of the town's tornado sirens had been taken out a lightning strike; I'm not sure if it was during that final storm or during one of the others earlier in the day. The tornado tracked along the northwestern edge of town, leveling some homes and damaging many more, and damaging some businesses, including the movie theater. Four of the six deaths were among residents of a trailer park.

Although the national media did cover the story, it was really local efforts, from the local newspaper and social media, that did the job. The Woodward News was providing updates by Twitter and posting photos on Facebook. Very soon after the tornado someone - or maybe a couple of people - from Joplin, Missouri, created Woodward Tornado Info on Facebook. It was rapidly handed off to Woodward natives Amber Wolanski and Lindsey Snider-Scotney, and became a community bulletin board to share up-to-the-minute information about needs, volunteer opportunities, scams, where do make cash donations, and more recently fundraisers. Matt Lehenbauer, Woodward's Emergency Management Director, told the Woodward News, "It has been an absolute godsend for recruiting volunteers...We've been able to rapidly fill needs in just a minute or an hour or 2. It's been phenomenal in recovery."   Mr. Lehenbauer said there were plans to have social media team to help with disasters in the future.  He's convinced it's valuable, but needs help to use it most effectively.  He told the Woodward News that the local emergency management team "may take volunteers who like to be on Facebook and are good with computers to help down the road."

Although the Governor of Oklahoma asked for Federal assistance, Woodward wasn't eligible for FEMA disaster relief (I think the criteria are that the destruction has to exceed what can be dealt with using local and state resources, and given what all has been done already I guess I see the point), but local businesses are eligible for loans from the Small Business Administration. Local banks and the Chamber of Commerce are collecting donations for the Woodward Tornado Relief Fund. Apache Corporation, an oil and gas company, donated $350,000 to upgrade the city's tornado warning system; there's been some other large corporate and personal donations as well. Larry Gatlin of the Gatlin Brothers did a benefit concert in Woodward that raised more than $50,000, and Woodward Tornado Info is working on getting more musicians to come to Woodward for tornado relief events.

Woodward was hit by a tornado in 1947. That storm destroyed much of the town and killed around a hundred people. "Back in those days, the National Weather Service forbid their forecasters from using the word tornado in their forecasts, a practice that continued until 1950. The only weather alarms were sounded by rural telephone supervisors calling each other." When the 1947 tornado struck, it was the third day of a national telephone strike, and there had been picket lines in Woodward; after the storm, the local telephone operators returned to work in spite of the strike.

Even though the sirens didn't sound on April 15, the Oklahoma City television stations were broadcasting warnings, as were weather radios. Others in Woodward got telephone calls from family or friends. Now, the new sirens are getting installed, and the Woodward News and Woodward Tornado Info are doing a great job of sharing information. And the National Weather Service -- long over their reluctance to talk about tornadoes in forecasts -- have this spring been evaluating the use of even stronger warning language, with phrases like "mass devastation," "catastrophic," and "unsurvivable" being evaluated for use in warnings when needed.



(photo from City of Woodward)

Woodward will rebuild; it's a resilient community, and the city will recover, just like they did the last time. Even though I didn't live there all that long, I do think of Woodward as my hometown and I'm sorry I couldn't be there to help; I probably will not make it there until my 40th high school reunion in the fall. But I can write a check, so that's what I'll do. And if you want to, too, make it out to the Tornado Relief Fund.

Tornado Season

I was out of town when the tornadoes hit, week before last.  Seeing the images on CNN that Thursday morning was heart-breaking.  Calling home, to make sure Atlanta had not been hit.  (I figured CNN would have mentioned that if it had, but just checking.)  Since then, reading about the devasting tornadoes that hit Tuscaloosa and Birmingham and lots of other towns with names that aren't so well known.  Little towns that probably were struggling to keep their downtowns from closing and people moving to bigger towns even before the tornado hit.  Now their downtown is gone and so are a lot of the houses.  Towns where people were born, grew up, got married, and had their children are just gone.

I grew up in Oklahoma and Kansas, and I have strong memories of fear of tornadoes.  Not actual tornadoes - I lived in towns that experienced devastating tornadoes, but they were either before I was born or when I was too young to remember them (and not in the part of town where we lived) - but hearing sirens, and (when we lived in a house with a basement) a few times going to the basement until a particularly strong storm passed.

I went to high school in Woodward, Oklahoma, which had been hit by a devastating tornado in 1947.  Hundreds of homes, damaged or destroyed, and about a hundred people killed in Woodward.  I remember a grave, at Elmwood Cemetery, marked "Unidentified Girl," but there were two unidentified children found in the rubble of the tornado in Woodward, a girl of about 12 and a baby girl.  According to Mike Coppock's compelling accound of the Woodward tornado, there was speculation "that the powerful storm blew them in from Texas, even though the farthest a human body was known to have been carried by a tornado was a mile."

Caroline and I were in Woodward, visiting my mother, in May 2004, when a storm system unleased a series of tornadoes south and east of Woodward.  One of them hit Geary, the town where my parents met as school teachers in the 1930s.  The storms were moving away from us, not toward us, so there wasn't any sense of personal threat - but we kept the television on and watched, mesmerized, as the storm system moved across western Oklahoma.   They knew exactly where the tornadoes were, with great precision, and tracked them from intersection to intersection.  Talking about that evening later, to friends in Atlanta, I said that the local TV stations in Oklahoma cover weather the way the Atlanta stations cover traffic.  Driving back to Oklahoma City to the airport, I remember we saw some storm damage north of Geary - a galvanized metal structure on its size, and broken trees - but it wasn't a really strong tornado and there weren't many people in its path.

The paths of these tornadoes - the ones that just hit Alabama and Georgia and other southeastern states - were long and wide and went through populated areas.  Hundreds of people died, thousands lost their homes.  Lynsley shared the information the other day that there will be a truck at Morningside Presbyterian Church on Wednesday to collect relief supplies.  We bought peanut butter and a big corregated box of diapers at Target yesterday and will be doing some more shopping before Wednesday.  So check the list of what they need and make a trip to your favorite store so you can give a little something to some people who have lost everything.  And if you can't make it this week, they will be there every Wednesday through the end of the month.