Funnel of Death

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Marty Bernich, against all odds, was smiling. His ranch-style home was crumbled all around him. His cars lay crushed and muddied on his front lawn. The air was filled with floating, irritating bits of fiberglass insulation. But Bernich, a resident of a once nice block in Moore, Okla., knew how lucky he was. Not 48 hours earlier, he, his wife and their two daughters had shut themselves in a small utility room, linked arms and prayed, knowing a monster loomed above. "It was surreal, time was frozen," he said. "It felt like the tornado was hovering over our house," which it was. Then the pause ended, there was a roar ("like it exhaled"), and Bernich's house imploded. The utility room and its inhabitants, however, survived. "We feel blessed," said Bernich. And so did many. In the wake of one of the country's worst tornado disasters, "blessed" meant losing all you owned but escaping with your loved ones and your life.

Though living in the midst of Tornado Alley, most Oklahomans have never seen a twister. Many figured they'd never see one, assuming twisters only strike far out on the prairie, beyond the towns. That myth was laid to rest last Monday. At midafternoon National Weather Service meteorologists noted a startling accumulation of the supercell thunderstorms that spawn whirlwinds. By 4:45 they had issued their first tornado warning. Starting at 5:00 and continuing for 20 hours, a legion of twisters--more than 40, coming so fast that the exact count is uncertain--scourged the region. One, a behemoth originating near Chickasha, may be historic. Not for the width of its funnel--although at nearly a mile across, that was extraordinary--but a mobile Doppler radar from the University of Oklahoma clocked its peak wind speed at 318 m.p.h., which would make it the strongest wind recorded on Earth.

Even more ominous for those on the ground, however, was its demonic persistence. The average tornado logs mere minutes on the ground. The Chickasha twister settled in like a plow, ripping an 80-mile gash northeast through a corner of Oklahoma City and several suburbs over an endless four hours. Thousands of Oklahomans heard the shriek of the warning sirens gradually overwhelmed by a sound variously described as like a locomotive, or a screaming jet engine, or nothing on Earth. The worst fear, said Moore resident Delee MacAlister, "is the terror of knowing you are going to die. We prayed aloud: 'God save us! God save us! God save us! O, God!' It lasted for an eternity."

MacAlister was spared, but three others in Moore were not. Eleven perished in the small town of Bridge Creek alone; one man there lost his mother and his three-week-old son. Altogether, some 750 Oklahomans were injured and 41 killed. And three died in Kansas, and one in Texas. It was the nation's highest tornado-related body count in more than a decade. Property damage may reach $1 billion.

For Oklahomans, the scene of destruction conjured up the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Much of their state was in textbook chaos: trees in living rooms, roofs blown off, crumpled cars in fields where cows should have been and dead livestock festooning parking lots. But at the big storm's extensive ground zero, the landscape was closer to lunar. Returnees sometimes had trouble locating not just their homes but their neighborhood. In Mulhall, a hamlet north of Oklahoma City, the only store was flattened, the water tower torn down, and every one of the 200 homes damaged.

By the weekend, crews were still sifting rubble for four missing persons. Mostly the searchers turned up not corpses but the mere record of lives: a half-buried checkbook, a Christmas-tree stand, a little red wagon crushed under a beam. In Del City, Monica Hicks wandered the vacant lot that had been her home and remarked, "I knew it would be bad, but I didn't prepare myself for this. My three-year-old said, 'Mommy, the tornado ate our house.'" Hicks spotted a pink plastic Cadillac on the ground with a doll at the wheel and broke into a loopy, exhausted grin. "Barbie wore her seat belt," she said.

By Friday, President Clinton had declared 16 counties disaster areas. The calamity will yield data on the meteorology of murderous storms. It will also fuel a campaign to assure that new homes built in Tornado Alley without traditional storm shelters include reinforced safe rooms. But the main message, at least according to the Daily Oklahoman, lay elsewhere. As it happens, last Thursday was the 48th annual Day of Prayer. "Right now in Oklahoma," the newspaper editorialized, "it sure seems like common sense to make every day a day of prayer."

--Reported by Hilary Hylton/Oklahoma City

With reporting by Hilary Hylton/Oklahoma City