Im Alive

Hello fellow blades, I'm not sure where to begin. I live in Moore, Oklahoma, which many of you have probably heard of considering the massive tornado that came through yesterday. I'm still alive and my house remains standing, but I have to tell you, this city is in one hell of a catastrophe. National guardsmen are everywhere and it's basically as if the town has been quarantined, you cannot get in my neighborhood by car because every single road near here is blocked, and the power was out until very recently. I'm not really sure how much this has been broadcasted as I haven't been able to get to a television in awhile, so I will give a first hand account of what happened to me.
 
This was the last week I would ever have to spend in high school, as I am graduating soon, and it began like any other except that I took the bus to school instead of driving because I was low on gas. The weather was very bright and sunny and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I had heard nothing about any oncoming storms until the last class period of the day. We had a substitute in my sixth hour and were assigned busy work. It was a day filled with laughter as the sub seemed to have a stick up her ass and all of my friends did a pretty good job making fun of her; the whole class was a joke. About halfway through class (i think) it started thundering. Then about 5-10 minutes later we could hear the tornado sirens going off. I still wasn't worried at this point, in Oklahoma we don't really worry about storms unless we can actually see and hear the tornado.

We were in an upstairs class so when the principal gave the order to go into tornado procedure we had to go downstairs to another class where they had the news on. At this point I was still not worried and all of my friends were still laughing and having a great time. We were then told that the tornado was near another high school in town (there are 3, so its a fairly large town) so at that point I was a little worried about my friends at the other school but had no idea what the tornado was like, I had assumed it hadn't touched down and was fairly weak. About 1 minute later I lloked up at the television and the news showed an image of the biggest tornado I've ever seen and it wasn't near the other high school, but at a walmart about 3 miles from school (and about 2 miles from my house). 
 
Not even 30 seconds after I saw the image on the tv someone opened the classroom door and shouted "we were told that we need to be underground!" everybody got up at once and sprinted out of the door. It was chaotic and much like a movie; everybody was running through the halls in dismay and if you looked out of any windows you would see how dark and bleak it was outside. We ran through the doors of the building and into the courtyard and looked up, the clouds were thick and black and you could see circulation. But the sound was horrifying: it sounded like a freight train headed straight for us. We hurried into the gym where we were crammed into underground locker rooms. One barely had room to move. Everybody was extremely worried, some were crying even. We were told to get down and cover our heads right before the power went out.
 
By the time we where allowed to leave the locker room it was about 45 minutes after we would have gotten out of school, but they weren't letting us leave yet. The gym was dark because the power was out and there were parents frantically searching for their children and children looking for their friends. People were crying all around me; horrible rumors were being spread. They were saying that the Warren Theatre (the center piece of Moore) was wiped out, and that one of the junior highs that feeds into our high school was destroyed, killing a lot of my school's younger siblings. Luckily neither of these turned out to be true but at the time they were terrifying. I had the right to leave whenever I wanted, it was only minors that had to have parents to check them out, but I wanted to stay with my neighbor and a friend of mine who were underaged. 
 
Eventually we were allowed to go into the commons and thats when I told my friends we should leave. As we crossed the parking lot I couldn't believe my eyes. Everything in front of me was covered in debris. There was wood everywhere and every car was covered in sludge, and the power was out for the whole town, rendering the street lights useless. The entire town was in chaos because everybody was trying to get somewhere and none of the traffic lights worked, so traffic was terrible. The noise was a din of wailing sirend and helicopters; the sound track of catastrophe. My friends and I (friend A, who is my neighbor, and friend B, who rides my bus but lives in a different neighborhood) began going to friend B's house. I had heard people say that friend B's entire neighborhood got leveled so I wanted to be with him when he found out so I could comfort him. He walked around and everything resembled a movie where the world is ending: the streets and sidewalks were riddled with people trying to get somewhere and nothing seem right, not to mention the entire town was covered in grime.
 
Apparently on the news it was announced that our school was destroyed because everybody we ran into asked where we came from and if the high school was okay. We finally reached the field next to the railroad tracks which separates my neighborhood with friend B's and saw exactly where the tornado had made its path. Buildings lie in shambles and houses were completely annihilated. I could not see my neighborhood, but the neighborhood right next to mine, which isn't even a 5 minute walk from my house, was destroyed, as if it had been bombed. I held back my tears as I said out loud "it didn't hit our neighborhood, its just a debris cloud. Our neighborhood didn't get hit by the tornado, just the debris cloud" as if to fool myself. We decided to remain on course to go to friend B's house and began crossing the field towards the train tracks. 
 
At this point a helicopter began following us, pretty low to the ground, so I'm pretty sure we were on the news then, whether it was local or national I'm not sure, but hopefully some of you guys saw footage of me crossing a field or something, that would be pretty cool. The field was completely covered in debris, with pieces of wood and chunks or roof that were bigger than me scattered all throughout. Then friend B saw his neighborhood and his jaw dropped. He started sprinting towards his house, skipping over debris. I ran after him and almost slipped several times trying to avoid big wooden spikes and heaps of insulation. We made it to the neighborhood that looked like it had been bombed. Everything was shredded. This is where I discovered that the theatre was still standing. Normally you can barely see it from where we were because of all of the houses and trees in the way, but all of that was wiped out and we had a clear view of the theatre, though it was the wreckage that caught our eyes.
 
This neighborhood was the most devastating thing I have ever seen in person. It was in complete ruin and looked like it had never been a development, but a dump instead. Cars were upside down and crumpled into desk-sized masses, scattered all over the field along with a few bodies, wihich I thankfully never got a decent view of. Luckily, friend B's street was spared, his house was damaged, but not beyond repair. However, I do know that a couple of kids that ride my bus weren't so lucky and are now homeless.
 
Finally we were homeward bound as I was curious to see what had become of my neighborhood and thankfully it was spared by the tornado, not by the debris cloud though (the debris cloud was 2 and 1/2 miles wide) as the whole neighborhood (the whole town actually) was covered in wood, insulation, and this miscellaneous wet brown sludge. But I still had a home, and my family was okay, which is plenty more than what a lot of my friends could say. On the way home I asked my friends if they thought this would be on the national news and they both said no, i find that kind of funny considering how little we knew, we had no idea how bad it was even after seeing what was once 8th through 10th street
 
I obviously have much more to say, as I haven't covered how I dealt with reuniting with my family or how i dealt with my 80 year old grandmother with dementia that I take care of, but I will save that story for another time, I could type away all night and not even go into enough detail to convey everything that I felt. I hope that I have come back to a supporting community. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTpceWd8UE4&feature=youtube_gdata_player

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_DcO4Y-dKE
 
Shit hit the fan

 

The strange thing is that schools are shut down, so it's technically summer break now. They froze our grades an that's what we ended up with, finals are no more and all of the normal end of the year festivities like Senior Breakfast were thrown out of the window. This wasn't how I wanted to end my last year in high school, I need closure, I need to see all of my friends and say goodbye and make sure they are all okay, and the teachers as well. I bet there are still people that need to know if I'm okay as well. This was all just a traumatic experience.

 

Thank you guys for your support, I'm glad to see that Grasscity has a good share of caring members. I walked down to the elementary school that got hit and I have to say that what I saw wasn't half as bad as what the people in that neighborhood went through. What used to be a development had been reduced to a giant field of rubble. To get into the neighborhood I had walk over collapsed roofs and tiptoe my way through piles of wood. I saw cars that had been thrown hundreds of yards from their homes and collapsed into balls the size of a dishwasher. There was even a bathtub that had been ripped off of the ground and thrown through the window of another building. The school building itself was demolished and I can only imagine how terrified the children inside must have been and it's a miracle that the entire school hadn't been killed. I had planned on filming what the school looked like so that I could share it online but couldn't bring myself to do it, it just wouldn't have felt right. To paint a picture as to how demolished the suburb was imagine if a giant lawn mower ran over your neighborhood, then took the mower bag and spread it all out, then repeated the process one or two more times. And that's what Moore looks like right now.

 

If its too long for you to read then don't even post on here because you are contributing nothing to this thread

 

Yes it was an F5, and while OK is known for tornadoes, this one was the worst one since '99, and might even be worse than that one. It hit a hospital, a junior high school, and 2 elementary schools, as well as a ton of houses and businesses. When children die its hard to expect anything less really.