El Reno: 1 Year Later

For the length of this blog project, the focus has been mainly on how the El Reno tornado impacted us as a meteorological community. Let's shift gears here and talk a little bit about how this devastating monster storm impacted the El Reno community.

First let's summarize some basic facts about the El Reno tornado to put this monster into perspective. The tornado first touched down at 6:03 P.M. central time and it lifted at 6:43 P.M. During it's 40 minute life span it grew to a whopping 2.6 miles wide, was on the ground for 16.2 miles, and reached extreme wind speeds in excess of 296 mph inside the tornado. This classifies as an EF5, but surveyed damage from the storm rates it at an EF3, mainly because a lot of structures weren't affected and it was hard to survey the damage for that reason.

With the Moore tornado occurring just 11 short days before El Reno, residents of the small town still had fresh memories of what a storm like this was capable of doing. Perhaps that is why many residents chose to evacuate the city instead of taking shelter in their homes. In doing so all the major interstates (35, 40 ,44, and 240) out of the city became parking lots as many residents were trying to head south to get out of the storm's way. Northbound lanes suddenly became southbound lanes said some residents. The roads were utter chaos, and it didn't help that the storm started to near the city during the rush hour. 

It's a stroke of luck that this deadly tornado remained over mostly open terrain. If the tornado had made that turn north somewhere in the beginning of it touching down, there would have undoubtedly been more damage as it would have headed directly into the more populated areas of El Reno. If the tornado would have continued on it's path, before making that bizarre turn north, it also would have went right into the heart of Oklahoma City. When it really comes down to it, the residents of both El Reno and Oklahoma City greatly lucked out on this tragic day. The losses suffered from this monster storm would have been more dire, had either of the two scenarios above played out.

Despite the tornado remaining mostly over empty flowing fields, like most storm chasers dream of, the emotional devastation brought forth by this monster was unimaginable. 8 people lost their lives this day and another 151 were injured. Amongst the injured included The Weather Channels Mike Bettes and TornadoVideos.net's Reed Timmer who both got a little bit too close to the storm.  They were the lucky ones, though. Others weren't so lucky. Richard Charles Henderson, Tim Samaras, Paul Samaras, and Carl Young were all storm chasers that perished in El Reno. We will never be able to get those precious lives back, but their memories will live on forever in our hearts.