3 May 2000

It's one year since the devastating outbreak. The Weather Signposts presents a collection of links on the web with a touch of humanity on the tragic outbreak. The outbreak, the lessons learned, the victims... will not be forgotten.

This outbreak was, in a way, one that has left the deepest impression on me. It was the first "really big one" that I had ever heard of while I existed on this planet. I read everything on the event that I could get my hands on for almost a year. Never did I realize that there was so much to a single outbreak.

Like many, I tend to see such events as tests and lessons for people. There is a recent song which contained a line, "lessons learned and they sure run deep... don't come easy and they don't come cheap." This one wasn't cheap. In case you're new to the weather world, the Oklahoma City/Moore tornado in the May 3rd outbreak was the USA's first billion-dollar tornado. Shoddy building structures, forecasts and forecasters, warnings, precautions taken by the public... were all put to the test.

Lets start here with chase logs... after all, they are the war stories from the front lines. If you haven't start looking over the links, I suggest you do that now. There isn't much else for me to say since I wasn't there myself... so I shall only make this more of compilation of links and my thoughts.

The extent of the damage was incredible. Thanks to near-record-breaking wind speeds and poor building structure.

"...I watched it as it developed on radar and became really frightened that it would move into Norman and could hurt or kill so many of my friends," he wrote in an e-mail to me about a week later. "Fortunately the tornado turned left, away from Norman, but because it did it struck Moore and Oklahoma City. As I watched this and the other simultaneously occurring tornadoes with other tornadic storms in central Oklahoma, I actually became choked up with tears. I realized I could not be a TV meteorologist to do that."

Even watching the storms on radar was a nightmare.

Then there is one more thing that I hope people will not do in the future... those "under the bridge" incidents. For those discussions on WX-CHASE... I made my opinions clear (well, relatively...) "But why show such footage [such as the video filmed by the TV crew from under an overpass during the Andover outbreak] anyway? After all it's misleading." Let me offer one simple solution: stop showing such footage-- no matter how exciting it could be. You can't see much of the storm structure if you're hiding under an overpass, so it would be worthless as a scientific video. Then why was it on National Geographic? My answer is simply: it was a big mistake! When I was new to the world of meteorology, I got the wrong impression as well! Good thing we don't get house-smashing tornadoes in Singapore!