Tornado kills dozens

Twenty-four people have been killed.

Initial reports put the death toll well above 50, but the medical examiner’s office has since revised the numbers down.
The Oklahoma medical examiner’s office said it has not yet received the latest 40 bodies to have been retrieved from the rubble in Moore, but had been told by emergency services to expect them, an official has said.

The ferocious storm — less than 1 percent of all tornadoes reach such wind speeds — ripped through the suburb of Moore on Monday in a mid-west region of the US known as tornado alley.

The storm laid waste to scores of buildings in the community of 41,000 people about 10 miles south of Oklahoma City.
Block after block lay in ruins. Homes were crushed into piles of broken wood. Cars and trucks were left crumpled on the roadside. Rescuers launched a desperate rescue effort at the Plaza Towers school, pulling children from heaps of debris and carrying them to a triage centre.

The National Weather Service estimated that the tornado was an EF-4 on the enhanced five-point Fujita scale, the second most powerful type of twister.
More than 120 people were being treated at hospitals, including about 50 children as the search-and-rescue efforts continued throughout the night. In video footage of the storm, the dark funnel cloud could be seen marching slowly across the green landscape.

As it churned through the community, the twister scattered shards of wood, awnings and glass all over the streets. The Oklahoma governor, Mary Fallin, deployed National Guard members to assist with rescue operations and activated extra highway patrol officers.

Fallin also spoke to President Barack Obama, who declared a major disaster and ordered federal aid to supplement state and local recovery efforts.
“Hearts are broken” for parents looking for their children, Fallin told a news conference.

At the school, the storm tore off the roof, knocked down walls and turned the playground into a mass of twisted plastic and metal.
Children from the school were among the dead, but several students were pulled alive from the rubble.

Rescue workers passed the survivors down a human chain to the triage centre in the car park. Many telephone lines to stricken areas were down, and mobile phone networks were congested. The storm was so massive that it will take time to establish communications between rescuers and state officials, the governor said.

The tornado also destroyed the city hospital and numerous businesses. The mayor of Moore, Glenn Lewis, said he watched it pass through from his jewellery shop.
Monday’s devastation in Oklahoma came almost exactly two years after an enormous twister ripped through the city of Joplin, Missouri, killing 158 people and injuring hundreds more. — guardian.co.uk.