I left the office at 4 pm and started heading home. Since I-40 was at a stand-still because of all the people getting off work early and trying to beat the storm home, I decided to take May Ave. Unfortunately, it wasn’t any better. It usually takes me 15 minutes to get home (I live just south of OCCC), but on this day, it took me 45 minutes. I finally reached my house at 4:45 pm and gathered up my storm spotting equipment. At around 5:15 pm, I met up with a fellow REACT member and storm spotter at OCCC. We always try to go out in pairs, so one spotter has a laptop with radar on it, while the other spotter drives. That way, the passenger with the laptop does the navigating and lets the driver know where to drive to stay out of danger. By that time, south Oklahoma County was under a tornado warning and many of the tornadoes that were forming were rain wrapped, making it very difficult to see them. As I spoke to my partner, we assessed the situation and determined that tornadoes were forming too quickly and moving too fast for us to keep up with. If we went south or west, we knew we would get trapped in the storm. If we had been able to pull out and start spotting at 4:30 pm, we could have made it to the west side of the storms before the tornadoes started forming and spotted as they entered the south part of the metro. We decided that the news media was already on top of this and we were in a danger zone, so we took cover.
Immediately after the storm went by SW OKC, we headed down to Newcastle, Oklahoma to check on the damage there. As we pulled into the town, police and Highway Patrol already had the main street blocked off. We identified ourselves to them as Central Oklahoma REACT members and they allowed us to pass through the road block to go assist in triage. When we arrived at triage, paramedics were standing by. We learned that nobody had been transported to any hospitals and that no injuries had been reported, so we went to meet up with the fire chief for an assignment, who in turn referred us to his Emergency Management supervisor. We identified ourselves to him and informed him we were there to assist in any way. He told us that everything was taken care of, so we left Newcastle. We already had REACT members in Piedmont, so we decided to see if we could assist the smaller towns. Initial reports were that Noble, Washington and Goldsby took a direct hit from the tornado, so we headed to Noble to see where we could assist.
North side of the gym at First Baptist Church in Newcastle
East side of gym at FBC in Newcastle
North side of gym
A field just north of the FBC gym
This used to be a billboard on the east side of Main Street in Newcastle
Once we arrived in Noble, we saw no damage. We stopped at the police station and they advised us that Noble did not get hit by a tornado. After they made a few phone calls, they were informed that neither Goldsby nor Washington got hit either. So, we decided to head back to Oklahoma City. Since there was no search and rescue efforts in south OKC and several of our REACT team members were already assisting in Piedmont, I decided to call it a night.
http://www.okcentralreact.org/
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