Moore, Oklahoma: The Last EF-Five

At two twenty-three in the afternoon on May twentieth, twenty thirteen, a tornado touched down near Newcastle, Oklahoma, and began moving northeast toward the suburb of Moore. What came next lasted thirty-seven minutes and left a damage path one and three-quarter miles wide through one of the most densely developed corridors in the Oklahoma City metro.

The National Weather Service rated it EF-Five , the highest rating on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, requiring estimated winds above two hundred miles per hour. Peak gusts were measured at around two hundred ten miles per hour. The tornado destroyed or heavily damaged approximately twenty-four hundred buildings, leveled a hospital, and killed twenty-four people.

Seven of those twenty-four were third-graders at Plaza Towers Elementary School. The children had done everything right: they sheltered against interior walls in the lowest part of the building, exactly as they had practiced. The school had no underground shelter. When the tornado passed directly over Plaza Towers, that was not enough. Sydney Angle, Antonia Candelaria, Emily Conatzer, Kyle Davis, Nicolas McCabe, Janae Hornsby, and Christopher Legg , none older than nine , did not survive.

Moore had been struck by violent tornadoes before. An F-Five in May of nineteen ninety-nine had passed through nearly the same corridor, and FEMA had funded storm shelters in two of Moore's schools afterward. But funding had not extended further, and Plaza Towers was not one of them.

The deaths of those seven children forced a reckoning. A bond issue passed in twenty fifteen requiring underground safe rooms in every Moore public school building , rooms rated to protect the entire student and staff population. For twelve years after Moore, no tornado anywhere in the United States received an EF-Five rating, the longest gap in the modern record, until an EF-Five finally struck Enderlin, North Dakota, in June of twenty twenty-five.