NORMAN, Okla. – People whose lives were upended within seconds by storms that tore through the Oklahoma City area Sunday night are struggling to figure out the road to recovery.
There were at least nine reports of tornadoes in the Great Plains – seven of those came from Oklahoma alone.
One of the hardest hit places in the Sooner State appears to be a neighborhood in Norman, a suburb of Oklahoma City, where FOX Weather’s Brandy Campbell shared images and video Monday of roofs missing, flipped cars and streets littered with debris.
WHAT YOU SHOULD DO IF YOUR PROPERTY SUSTAINED TORNADO DAMAGE
David Stanley, who has lived in the neighborhood for about a year after moving there from California, said this was his first experience with a tornado.
“The windows exploded in the house,” Stanley said. “The garage door looks like it wanted to come off. You can see the tree is down. We’ve got holes in the roof. It was scary.”
Stanley said the twister came and went in about 15 seconds. He said has seen tornado damage on the news before, but to experience it is entirely different.
“The intensity. The violence of it all, and, like I said, it happened so quickly,” Stanley said.
Carmen Marco said she was also shocked at how quickly the storm happened.
“It was very sudden,” Marco said. “Like, it came out of nowhere. You felt the pressure change. My ears popped and windows went out. We could hear crashing. We could hear banging. It was a lot.”
WHERE ARE TORNADOES MOST LIKELY TO OCCUR IN FEBRUARY?
Dedrick Hoffstead said the wind was blowing through his home as he and his family scurried to the bathroom for safety. He said that when they emerged from their shelter, several neighbors were standing in their home to check on them.
“I’m kind of at a loss for words,” Hoffstead said. “My shed is gone. Everything that we own, everything I feel like we kind of worked for, is just in the wind now.”
HOW METEOROLOGISTS DETERMINE IF A TORNADO IS TO BLAME FOR STORM DAMAGE
Insurance claims and damage assessments have already begun, but picking a starting place for cleanup is proving difficult. Both Stanley and Marco said they’ve been busy picking up the shattered glass that is scattered throughout their homes, but Hoffstead said a water leak has complicated the process at his home.
“I think everyone’s question is, ‘What’s the first step?’” Marco said. “Where do you even begin to clean this up?”
“I don’t know where to start,” Stanley said during an interview with Campbell. “Any ideas?”
Officials at the National Weather Service office in Norman said they have found damage that indicates that one of the tornadoes was at least an EF-2 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale. That means it had winds of between 111 and 135 mph.