“A storm is coming
And thunder sends me running
All in a hurry
My heart is wrought with worry
And I know if I’m caught in the fury
Nothing will remain
Nothing will remain…”

~Oklahoma Town by Josh Gabriel presents Winter Kills

All journalists have days that stand out in their memories. Earthquakes. Tsunamis. Terrorism. War.

For me here in Ada, Oklahoma, some of those memories are from tornadoes, and one tornado stands out: the storm that became known the “Greater Ader Tornader,” 25 years ago today. It was preceded, ominously, by famed weatherman Gary England canceling his Ada presentation of Those Terrible Twisters so he could monitor the weather situation from his channel 9 base in Oklahoma City.

As part of working a split shift for morning deadline and afternoon baseball, I went home for a nap at around 2 pm. Just before 4:30, Jeff, our current sports editor who was a general assignment reporter then, called and excitedly told me there was a tornado warning and there was a tornado reportedly “on the ground” in Pickett just to our west.

I sprung into action, going outside to photograph a wall cloud that was part of the Pickett thunderstorm. Within seconds, I heard raised voices on the scanner and the tornado siren. Another tornado was on the ground in Ada. In fact, I turned my view from the north to the southwest to see an airborne debris field, which Randy (another staff member at my newspaper now) witnessed from a different location and described as, “what looked like circling hawks.”

I ducked back into my apartment and paused for a second in my hall: I was on the second story of a flimsily-built apartment and, in my estimation, could do little about my situation. Fortunately, the funnel cloud passed just half a block to my south, and not actually touching the ground at that point.

As soon as it had passed, I locked my doors and ran to my car, immediately driving down the street to 12th and Mississippi, where the scanner was immediately reporting damage. I discovered the filling station at the end of my block had been significantly damaged.

This is the facade of ECU’s New Science Building, which had just been completed and had yet to be occupied when it was damaged.I then darted over the East Central University, which was just five blocks from my house. A van was overturned in the parking lot, and the New Science Building, which had yet to open, was damaged as well.

Continuing to follow scanner reports (since it would be six more years before I got my first cell phone), I made my way west on 14th Street to the 100 block, where several houses had been pushed off their foundations.

Continuing to listen to scanner reports and word on the street, I drove out to Pickett, where several houses were down. Finally, as darkness approached, I swung by the National Guard Armory and made my last pictures of the day.

These were the first tornados of the season in Oklahoma. There is a decent breakdown of Oklahoma tornadoes in 1991 here.