Tornadoes and Garfield County have not been strangers

Enid News & Eagle, Jun 14, 2015

ENID, Okla. — Garfield County has a rich history of land runs, farming, oil and natural gas production — and weather.

Smack in the center of Tornado Alley, Garfield County has had its fair share of twisters.

The National Weather Service in Norman began recording tornadoes in Garfield County in 1955, and since then, has counted 71 tornadoes.

The NWS recorded an F1 tornado near Garber at 9 p.m. on April 27, 1955, the first in the database.

NWS Meteorologist Forrest Mitchell said they know of tornadoes prior to 1955, but the NWS doesn’t have reliable data on them.

The NWS uses the Enhanced Fujita Scale to determine tornado severity, which measures wind estimates based on damage; the NWS switched from the Fujita Scale to the EF Scale in 2007 for more accurate measurements, Mitchell said.

“It’s based on damage,” he said. “Size isn’t the only factor. A lot of it has to do with what’s inside the tornado being flung around for a duration of time. If it’s just wind, that’s one thing. If you have wind and projectiles, that’s quite another thing.”

On the EF Scale, an EF0 tornado produces 65 to 85 mph wind gusts; EF1 produces 86 to 110 mph gusts; EF2 produces 111 to 135 mph gusts; EF3 produces 136 to 165 mph gusts; EF4 produces 166 to 200 mph gusts; and an EF5 tornado produces gusts in excess of 200 mph.

‘I had to clean up that mess’

On April 26, 1970, the NWS recorded an F0 tornado that blew through Drummond and lifted near Waukomis.

Though rated as a weak tornado, the twister did plenty of damage, including demolishing Charles Metz’s farm house and machine shed, the Enid Morning News reported on April 27, 1970.

Tom Metz told the Enid News & Eagle on Friday he remembered well the tornado that blasted his father’s farm.

“I had to clean up that mess,” he said. “It tore the house all up, took the roof and the top story off the house, destroyed the machine shed. Tore up about everything on the place.”

Tom lived in Waukomis at the time, and he and his brothers went to assess the damage, he said.

“I saw it all torn to pieces and called into work and told them I was taking some vacation days,” he said. “I took a week or two of vacation. We rebuilt the house and put a new roof on it, built a new shop, a new airplane hangar.”

Charles Metz liked to fly, Tom said, but the tornado took his small plane, chewed it up and spit it out.

“He had an airplane ever since I was a little kid,” he said. “He got another one.”

‘It took a long time to find her’

Garfield County has not experienced a tornado stronger than EF2 since the scale switch, but did experience two F4 tornadoes, which produced wind gusts up 208 to 260 mph as measured by the Fujita Scale.

On the afternoon of May 2, 1979, a thunderstorm spawned two tornadoes, an F3 near Marshall and an F4 northeast of Cleo Springs in Major County, which traveled across Meno, Lahoma and lifted in far southeast Enid.

The NWS reported the F4 tornado killed one person directly, and injured 25. The Enid Morning News reported in a May 3, 1979, article by staff writers Helen Carnell and David Crenshaw that two people died, one of injuries from the tornado, and one of cardiac arrest after fleeing the tornado.

“Two Garfield County towns, Lahoma and Waukomis, also sustained extensive damage in the storm, as well as scattered damage across the northwest area,” the article reads. “Dead on arrival in the Fairview Hospital was 14-year-old Connie Jo Kerfoot, killed when the twister hit her grandparents’ home.

“Burfor Mayberry, 41, dead on arrival at St. Mary’s, as a result of cardiac arrest.

“‘We don’t know if the girl was just coming through the doorway or what,’ one official said, “‘But her body was picked up and carried 100 yards before being dropped into a field.’”

In the article, the unnamed official went on to say Kerfoot died of injuries to her arms, neck and head.

On Friday, Connie Jo’s sister, Kathy Kerfoot, told the Enid News & Eagle she was at work at St. Mary’s the day the twister hit.

“When we got the news, it took a long time to find her,” she said. “My grandfather had gotten the car and they were going to leave, and a tree hit his car. He got in the floorboard and rode it out.”

Her grandmother and Connie Jo were in the house when the tornado turned on the structure, Kerfoot said.

“My grandmother said they went from room to room, and (the tornado) just kept taking every room, and she had a hold of her hand, and then she was gone.”

Her grandmother spent some time in the hospital after suffering a “huge laceration on her head and some broken vertebrae,” Kerfoot said, adding that her grandfather was not injured.

The tornado destroyed her grandparents’ farm, and though they never rebuilt, Kerfoot’s uncle rebuilt the house.

“My great-grandparents had obtained that land in the land run,” she said. “They’ve been there a long time.”

Now, Kerfoot and her mother live on the family land, about half a mile from where the original house stood.

“Needless to say, my mother has a storm shelter,” Kerfoot said, adding that her grandparents had an old shelter that hadn’t been used for a long time. “I remember going in it when I was a kid.”

‘We could feel the tornado pulling the truck’

Garfield County would go on to avoid tornado-related deaths and injuries until 1991, when a storm spawned tornadoes across Oklahoma and Kansas, killing 26 in Andover, Kan.

Michael Burwell was chief of the fledgling Fairmont Volunteer Fire Department, which had just built a station the year before, when he got word on April 26, 1991, that Garfield County was at “severe risk for tornadoes.”

“I thought, ‘Something is liable to happen, the way things are doing,’” he told the Enid News & Eagle on Friday.

He and a fellow volunteer firefighter drove south on 144th, then Fairmont Road, to a lookout point, he said.

“We could see for miles,” he said. “We were looking back toward the southwest, and we looked up at this cloud and said, ‘That cloud don’t look very good at all.’ We watched it for a while. We could see the rotation of it, and all of a sudden we could see it working itself down.”

The tornado, an F4 later known as the Red Rock tornado, touched down and started moving northeast, toward Brenkinridge, so they headed to U.S. 412 to stop traffic, Burwell said.

“We could feel the tornado pulling the truck,” Burwell recalled. “We could see it hit a trailer house and destroyed it, hit another house, and then it went down and hit the Taylor house.”

Marianne Mills, then 8-year-old Marianne Taylor, recalled when the tornado hit their house and they raced to the cellar.

“I couldn’t find my shoes so I wore baseball cleats down to the cellar,” she said.

Burwell rushed to see if they were OK, he said.

“It hit the propane tank,” he said. “I could see the tank with the propane coming out and going down under the house.”

He and the Taylors shouted to each other; the house had shifted over the cellar doors, trapping them inside.

“I knew we had to get them out,” he said, and after the rest of the Fairmont crew pulled up, they used a high-lift jack to raise the corner of the house enough to get the Taylors out.

The twister traveled 66 miles on through Billings, Red Rock and lifted near Pawhuska in Osage County; because it stayed to mostly rural areas, only six injuries were reported.

“It was spooky,” Burwell said. “Being new at doing something like that and seeing those kids down in there, it kinda gets to you.

“But that tornado was beautiful. It was gorgeous. As much damage as one of them does, it’s still beautiful to look at.”

‘Statewide’

Since 1950, Oklahoma has experienced 3,574 tornadoes of all shapes and sizes, Mitchell said, and Oklahoma experienced almost five times as many tornadoes so far in 2015 than 2014; so far, the NWS has counted 75 tornadoes this year, compared with the 16 in 2014.

“We are making up for last year,” he said. “It was the least ever recorded since reliable tornado data was being kept.”

The reason for the stark contrast in tornadic activity is simple.

“Drought,” Mitchell said. “You gotta have a thunderstorm before you have a tornado.”

It’s no secret tornadoes are a force to be reckoned with.

The May 2, 1979, F3 tornado didn’t result in any injuries, but Mitchell said it did play with two empty 300 gallon oil storage tanks, each weighing 8,600 pounds, moving them a mile from their original location.

The biggest tornado in Oklahoma anda record was the El Reno Tornado, an EF5, on May 31, 2013, Mitchell said.

“It was 2.6 miles in diameter at one point,” he said.

The tornado with the longest path, an F5, touched down in Woodward on April 9, 1947, he said.

“It had a path of 1,500 yards wide at its peak,” he said. “Initial surveyors thought it was one continuous 170 mile path, but since then it has been determined it was one of a continuous spawn of tornadoes. It’s path was 68 miles.”

As for the question on most Oklahoman’s minds, Mitchell said there is no answer.

“It’s just sheer coincidence that tornadoes spawn over Moore,” he said. “It has nothing to do with location. There’s not a fork of two rivers at Moore. It’s nothing to do with how the South Canadian River is oriented in respect to the town. Was the town established on an ancient Native American burial ground and now it’s cursed? No.

“There is no statistical, scientifically based study that says Moore is a tornado magnet.”