Manny Fernandez and Ben Fenwick

“A gust came up and our house tipped over,” said Robert Gawhega, who survived the tornado that shook his trailer the way a child shakes a toy. “There I was, flying across the room.”

Severe weather in Tornado Alley on Saturday night made for a terrifying Memorial Day weekend.

A brief but violent tornado tore a 2-mile path through the outskirts of the Oklahoma City suburb of El Reno, demolishing much of the American Budget Value Inn motel and two of its neighbors, the Skyview mobile-home park and a car dealership. By Sunday afternoon, local officials said there had been two deaths.

Tornadoes in this part of Oklahoma have a history of being wide and long, and of carving a path of mayhem for a dozen miles or more at times. But the tornado that struck El Reno was something different: Aerial images taken by local news outlets show a short, curvy finger of destruction from a funnel that only momentarily touched down, centering much of its bite on the motel, the trailer park and the auto dealer.

“It’s a pretty devastating sight at this point in time,” Mayor Matt White told reporters on Sunday morning. “Pray for our community. We’ve been through a lot here lately.”

El Reno is one of several Oklahoma towns and cities that have been hard hit by widespread flooding over the past week.

Runoff from powerful storms filled the Arkansas River to bursting, prompting officials to release large amounts of water from the Keystone Dam. More than 1,000 homes in Oklahoma have been damaged by flooding, officials said.

One of the hardest-hit communities was the Tulsa suburb of Sand Springs, where 152 homes in a low-lying area near the river were flooded. The muddy waters rose just below some mailboxes and over the tops of others in the Town and Country neighborhood.

In other areas, a small army of rescue workers were busy on Saturday and Sunday delivering supplies and helping trapped residents to safety by boat and helicopter.

In Tulsa, the main concern facing officials on Sunday was the state of the city’s decades-old system of earthen levees, which have so far been holding for the most part.

On Sunday in El Reno, as emergency crews continued to search through the rubble, there was a quiet sense that the town had been spared a far deadlier disaster. Officials said everyone who had been inside the motel when the tornado struck was alive and accounted for. “A lot of them hid, and a lot of them gathered up down below,” White said of the motel guests.

The two people who died were from the Skyview trailer park. Late Sunday afternoon, White said the final grid search through the debris of the trailer park and the motel had been completed, with no more victims found and none expected. But some of the nearly 30 people who were injured remained hospitalized in serious or critical condition, he said.

“We could have absolutely seen a lot more destruction and death,” he said. “We feel blessed. I’ve been strong to this point, but I’m getting ready to break. We can’t have any more rain. I think the measurements showed that we had a little under 18 inches of rain in the last 31 days in El Reno, Oklahoma. We just need a little break.”

Forecasters with the National Weather Service in nearby Norman said that, based on a survey of the damage, the tornado was an EF-3 on the enhanced Fujita scale, with peak winds from 136 to 165 mph. EF-5 is the most powerful category. The forecasters said the tornado had been about 75 yards wide at its widest point, stayed on the ground for 2.2 miles and lasted only about four minutes.

It came six years, almost to the day, after El Reno was hit by another EF-3 tornado. On May 31, 2013, an unusually wide tornado barreled through the area and killed eight people.

El Reno is a working-class, largely rural suburb of nearly 17,000 people about 25 miles west of Oklahoma City. Cattle graze in the greenery on the sides of the highways, beneath billboards for oil field services companies. More than a few residents keep horses in their yards. The skyline of El Reno is dominated by grain silos, the tallest structures in a town whose history traces back to the establishment in 1874 of Fort Reno, a frontier Army post.

Tornado sirens blared in the town at 10:27 p.m. on Saturday, the mayor said. Four minutes later the tornado struck, damaging the southeastern section of the town near Interstate 40. A television news reporter, Aaron Brilbeck of the local CBS affiliate, KWTV News 9, showed the power of the storm as it came through the town, posting on Twitter: “The hotel across the street from us was leveled. Victims are being pulled from the rubble.”

At a convenience store called Domino across the street from the motel, the assistant manager, Jeffrey Pointer, said the evening had started quietly, with just a sprinkle of rain.

“But then it started pouring,” he said. “The rain was blowing sideways. You couldn’t see anything.”

The wind blew so hard that the windows started shaking. The power cut off, Pointer said, and an emergency generator kicked on. Then, as quickly as it had started, the roaring wind abated, leaving only rain in its wake.

The phones in the store started ringing, he said, with callers asking if everyone in the store was all right. Then people started walking in the door, drenched. Some had no shirts, Pointer said. Some were injured. He said a man came to him with his arm bleeding.

“He said: ‘Can you call me an ambulance? I’m hurt real bad,’” Pointer said.

At the Skyview trailer park, neither Gawhega nor his aunt, who was asleep in the trailer at the time, was injured. The mobile home was pushed onto its side.

Hours later, Gawhega, who is in his late 60s, went to El Reno’s chapter headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, where survivors from the motel and the trailer park slept on American Red Cross cots in the ballroom. Gawhega, an elder with the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal Nations who walks with a cane, wore his Oklahoma State University sweats — he is a retired campus groundskeeper — as he walked around the low brick building.

More than a century ago, before El Reno was founded, one of the chiefs prayed for the ground to be safe from tornadoes, Gawhega said, and since then tornadoes have often skirted the edges of El Reno rather than hitting it directly. He said he was grateful to have survived the storm.

“The spirits are protecting it,” Gawhega said of the town. He said he was grateful to the spirits as well: “I am just glad to be alive.”

Sofia Heck, another resident of the mobile-home park, said she and her boyfriend were on a date nearby when the tornado hit. Her teenage sons were at home alone. She had spoken with them on the phone during the storm, but feared for their safety and rushed back home, only to find the roads blocked with debris. Police officers stopped her from going in one entrance, but she sneaked in through another. Her children were safe, and her home had only minor damage.

“I’d had no idea,” Heck said, choking back tears. “That could have been the last time I saw them.”

Nancy Salsman, auxiliary president of the El Reno VFW, said on Sunday that there were 25 people taking shelter inside, many of them still sleeping after having been up all night. She said they had arrived quietly, and nearly expressionless.

“I think they’re in shock,” Salsman said. “Some of them lost everything.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="d2a0aac8-295a-3068-ad5a-c94774703346" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/oklahoma-el-reno-tornado.html">The New York Times</a>.

EL RENO, Okla. — Giant green dumpsters were tossed like rocks into motel rooms. Mobile homes were not just destroyed, they were shredded to scrap. Cars and trucks were spun around or flipped upside down. Doors and ceilings were ripped from walls, but picture frames, of all things, were left hanging, slightly askew.

Tornado leaves an Oklahoma town shaken

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Manny Fernandez and Ben Fenwick

Articles written by the author

Tornado leaves an Oklahoma town shaken