How well was Okla. elementary school equipped for disaster?

Most Oklahoma structures lack the kind of basement where students and teachers reportedly took shelter from Monday’s tornado.

 

They huddled in hallways, clung to walls inside bathrooms and reportedly sought shelter in the school's basement. The terrified children and teachers at the Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., were in all the right places, tornado safety experts say.

But conventional wisdom couldn’t save every young life when skies darkened and a ferocious 198 mph twister battered the building on Monday.

At least 24 fatalities have been confirmed after several homes and two schools were flattened by the devastating tornado in Moore and Oklahoma City. Nine children were among the dead and more than 200 injuries have been reported.

According to reports, seven children were found drowned inside a basement at Plaza Towers elementary, where 75 students and faculty took shelter. Many of the children were as young as eight years old.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Charlie Neese, a Tennessee-based severe weather safety expert and meteorologist who has assessed school buildings for their tornado resistance. “That’s just a freak occurrence.”

It’s already rare for a school to have a basement in Oklahoma, according to Chuck Doswell, a storm chaser and scientist at the University of Oklahoma.

“Most building construction in Oklahoma doesn’t include a basement,” he noted in an email, adding that “most schools in Oklahoma have a tornado plan, including designated shelter areas.”

Although shelter in underground cellars boosts survival chances, Weather Nation meteorologist Paul Douglas reported that fewer than one in 10 Oklahomans have a basement due to soil conditions that would make digging underground extremely cost-prohibitive.

In theory, the chances of the students and teachers surviving the EF5 tornado — the most powerful classification of twister on the enhanced Fujita scale — could have been decent.

Had it been another storm, Neese believes, the outcome may not have been so tragic. Neese said the school’s teachers and students had acted smartly to try to ensure the survival of the children. Some hid inside closets and bathrooms, which are usually smaller rooms that are fortified by piping.

“From everything I heard, there were teachers found on top of students, protecting them, trying to shield them with their own bodies, they took them out of their classrooms, went into more protected interior rooms and hallways, went down into the basement — for most tornadoes that would have been adequate,” Neese said. “But this storm was just a monster.”

Larry Tanner, an expert on disaster preparedness with the Texas Tech University’s National Wind Institute, said it’s not inconceivable that a school in Oklahoma would have a basement, though it would certainly be rare.

“I’ve been in a number of investigations in the state of Oklahoma, but that would probably be the first (school) basement I’ve seen,” he said.

He explained that the logic behind the idea of hunkering down in a hallway and away from classrooms, which tend to be on the exteriors of school buildings, is “to try to put as many walls between you and the outside as possible.”

Debris impacts are a serious issue and classrooms with windows create more vulnerability.

Plaza Towers Elementary was also constructed in the 1960s, Tanner noted.

“If it’s that old, it probably would not have been built to the 90 mile-per-hour wind design speeds that are required today,” he said.

Perhaps the only way to assure the safety of everyone in that building would have been to contain everyone in a “safe room” — whether above or below ground — that would have been structurally reinforced with tested doors, Tanner said.

“In schools, quite frequently they can be these standalone multi-purpose buildings that are built to the shelter standards, so maybe a gymnasium or an activity room.”

Glenn Lewis, the mayor of Moore, told CNN that schools rebuilt after a devastating 1999 tornado were constructed with reinforced tornado shelters, but Plaza Towers did not have such a designated safe room. The second school flattened by the storm also did not have a tornado shelter, according to Albert Ashwood, director of the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management.

One way or another, Neese said the tragedy underscores the fact that powerful forces of nature are volatile and that no amount of preparedness ever guarantees safety.

“With tornado safety and all these tips and rules, they’re all developed base on what happened in the past. You look at all the ways people were killed or survived, and then survival becomes a game of numbers,” Neese said. “Sometimes, you can do the right thing and it’s not enough, and sometimes you can get away with doing the wrong things and beat the odds on either side.”