As a massive tornado approached their Oklahoma house in 2013, an elderly couple named Jerrie and Hemant Bhondem had little time to prepare. Hemant’s osteoporosis prevented him from making it down into a storm shelter, so the two of them cowered together in the shower stall of their first-floor bathroom until, before Jerrie’s eyes, the tornado pulled her husband to his death, right from her grasp. As Holly Bailey recounts in “The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado,” Jerrie “barely had time to look at his face one last time before her husband disappeared into the sky.”
In her new book, Bailey explores the terrifying power of tornadoes and their wrenching toll through a portrait of Moore, Okla. This community, 10 miles south of Oklahoma City, earns the dubious distinction of having experienced two of the world’s largest and most devastating tornadoes — in 1999 and 2013.
The story is personal for Bailey, who grew up in Moore and went on to a career as a journalist and White House correspondent. Her aunt lost her house in the May 3, 1999, twister — the strongest tornado ever recorded — which killed 36 people and caused $1 billion in damage. And Bailey’s family also survived the May 20, 2013, tornado, notorious for being the most costly ever, with damages totaling $2 billion, and for unleashing wind with speeds of 302 mph, the highest ever recorded at Earth’s surface.
Not surprisingly, despite Bailey’s travels around the world with the White House press corps, she never lost her fascination with big weather or the shattering toll it can take. In “The Mercy of the Sky,” she sets out to portray not just tornadoes and their aftermath, but the type of people she grew up with: “resilient survivors, stubborn in their refusal to let nature get the best of them.” In Moore, Bailey notes, folks refer to their searing experiences with Mother Nature by date — “May 3rd” and “May 20th ” — much as New Yorkers and other Americans might talk about 9/11.
Bailey is a solid reporter, and her material is vivid and powerful. First, there is the terrifyingly fickle behavior of the tornadoes themselves. The book is peppered with examples such as that of the Bhondems. Bailey writes of one house in Moore that was completely obliterated except for its chimney and an adjacent closet in which clothes still hung undisturbed on their hangers. As she reports, “The only sign something was amiss was a few spots of mud, spit out by the storm and splattered on a jacket sleeve as innocuously as dots of tomato sauce after a spaghetti dinner.”
Or take the story of 74-year-old Barbara Garcia, who also stayed above ground during the 2013 storm. Her house was demolished, but somehow she managed to survive unhurt. In the commotion, though, she became separated from her beloved dog, Bowser. Miraculously, after the storm passed, he soon wandered back to her through the rubble unscathed.
Up-to-date Doppler radar equipment affords area residents a 16-minute warning as a tornado approaches, and the heart of the book offers a minute-by-minute account of the lead-up to the 2013 storm. The core narrative centers on the heroism of Amy Simpson and Jennifer Doan, respectively the principal and a third-grade teacher at Plaza Towers Elementary School, who try valiantly (but ultimately not totally successfully) to protect the children in their care from the impending cataclysm. Their harrowing experiences are well drawn and as riveting and moving as the best page-turning fiction.
But as poignant and well reported as many of the central stories are, the book is uneven. Bailey is a first-time author, and her narrative choices don’t hold together as well as they might. The story jumps around in time and location, perhaps in an effort to relate a kind of kaleidoscopic view as the storm arrives. The result, though, is often to dissipate the drama of the individual stories. Also, some stories work much better than others. Less engaging, for instance, are some of the long passages describing the accomplishments of the local TV stations’ weather coverage in a place where meteorologists naturally play a larger-than-average role in citizens’ lives.
Bailey has a good feel for the heroism and strength of her central characters and a journalist’s eye for color, such as when she mentions the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s mobile monitoring station, TOTO ( Totable Tornado Observatory), aptly named after Dorothy’s dog in “The Wizard of Oz.” But this reader would have greatly benefited from much more context and science. For all the drama and resilience of the residents of Moore, we want to know more about the how and why — what is known about the science of tornadoes, how many strike annually worldwide and why this part of Oklahoma that Bailey describes as “tornado alley” is so prone to them. To be sure, much remains unknown, but Bailey misses a chance to inform readers with gleanings from the latest research.
Another missed opportunity is the book’s treatment of tornadoes’ relation to climate change — a central question for the residents of Moore and for other citizens of Oklahoma, where the senior member of the state’s Senate delegation, Republican Sen. James Inhofe, leads the chorus of those stubbornly denying human-caused global warming in the face of overwhelming evidence. Bailey takes a pass on the whole subject, dismissing it early and never returning to it. “Some have attributed the dark turn in the weather to climate change,” she writes, “but the truth is, even the scientists who know more about tornadoes than anybody aren’t sure how to explain it.”
It is true that climate scientists know less about the link between global warming and tornadoes than they do about heat waves, drought, wildfires and sea-level rise. But the topic is terribly germane to the material at hand, and its omission can be maddening, especially when the politics of climate change seem to influence outcomes — such as when officials in Moore mandate that new schools be built with underground tornado shelters but, despite their repeated tragedies, leave the kids in existing schools without this vital protection.
Seth Shulman, editorial director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, writes the syndicated monthly column “Got Science?”
