This photo was taken by Jerry Laizure near 134th and south May Avenue just as the tornado was entering south Oklahoma City.

Tornadoes hit home

May 3, 1999
Oklahoma Tornado Outbreak

by Susan Cobb

Most of us have "I remember . . . " events in our lives. I remember when I heard about the Challenger explosion, and when President Reagan was shot. May 3, 1999 will also be one of those events that are forever etched in our minds. And each of us has our own story. We were intercepting the storm with VORTEX (Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes EXperiment), chasing on our own, watching the news, advising friends and relatives how to escape the tornado, and some of us were huddled in our homes hoping to survive. Afterwards we were looking for neighbors, watching family members head for the hospitals to treat the injured, and praying for survivors. I remember May 3, 1999 very clearly. By some strange coincidence, I had sat down with my sons that morning and worked through a tornado safety workbook. May 3 is a day we will never forget.

Instability was the only ingredient that was clearly in place for strong tornadoes in Oklahoma on the morning of May 3. As the day wore on, it looked as though high-precipitation supercells were going to develop, due to weak upper-level winds. Then the ingredients started to come together. Profilers showed jetstream winds were stronger then the models had shown. And then, as the first storms were forming near Lawton, OK, VORTEX-99 Principal Investigator Erik Rasmussen noticed a little corridor of surface winds stretching from near south-central Oklahoma toward southeast Oklahoma that were a lot more southeasterly than the southerly winds prevailing over most of the state. And that was the final ingredient--strong shear and significant winds in the lowest few thousand feet of the atmosphere.

The tornadoes first formed in southwest Oklahoma near Apache just before 5pm, and they just kept coming. By 5pm the next day (May 4), 75 tornadoes (72 in Oklahoma alone) had torn through Oklahoma and Kansas--more tornadoes than Oklahoma normally experiences in a year.

Tornado outbreaks of this magnitude are not unusual, occurring approximately every five years. What is unusual about the May 3, 1999 tornado outbreak in the central Plains was that F4 and F5 tornadoes hit a highly populated area. Large cities occupy a very small percentage of total land area in the United States, and the 2 percent of all tornadoes in the U.S. that are F4's and F5's generally occur in rural areas.

Amazingly, in the 8,000 buildings damaged or destroyed in Oklahoma alone, only 42 people died. Only 42. It sounds terrible. But seeing the destruction, the 38-mile path of complete devastation in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area alone, most of us were sickened by the surety of hundreds of deaths. Maybe even thousands. Advance warnings from the NWS that were broadcast on local television and radio stations, NOAA Weather Radio and amateur (HAM) radio, gave us plenty of time to seek shelter and kept the loss of life to a minimum.

What also makes this case unusual was that an F5 tornado passed fewer than 10 miles from NSSL and NWS offices. We had teams out studying this tremendous event as it began, and they obtained unprecedented information that will one day bring some good out of this tragedy.

Visible satellite photo of the storms over
Oklahoma the evening of May 3, 1999.