Well, you don’t spend too many birthdays like this.  By early afternoon, it had become apparent that all parameters for strong or violent tornadoes were elevated.  It had also become apparent that the area with the greatest risk would be close to home – too close.  With the idea that things would be forming in the front yard, we basically used the house as a place to hang out until first development.  When we saw that around 4 pm, we left the house and drove a few miles south of Okarche to view developing storms SW, W, and NW.  My concern this day was the highest that I ever remember.  I was concerned for our house, our town, the city of Oklahoma City, and our welfare as we would try to negotiate what I expected to be very ugly storms before days end.  It sounds cliché, but I truly had a bad feeling about this one.  My wife Mari was going to be with us, and we knew our daughter was safe, so those were some usual concerns that I didn’t have to think about.  It was also nice having Doug Speheger along – the person I most trust to have sitting next to me on high end days.

The isolated nature of the first developing storms didn’t last long and we soon had a nearly solid line of severe storms to our west.  We decided to drive south to the southern end of the line segment which was west of El Reno.  As we drove south on Highway 81, Okarche disappeared from view and I felt comfortable about the town, figuring that large hail and damaging wind were possible, but storm mode that direction didn’t really favor significant tornadoes.

The spectacle that we drove up on a couple miles south of I-40 was scary and amazing.  People were everywhere.  Chasers, locals, some that I figure didn’t want to be there, and possibly some that were fleeing from the projected path of the storm to our west.  After a cell merger took place to our west, rapid tornado development occurred and the structure of the storm quickly became impressive both on radar and visually.  Very strong inflow winds developed and it wasn’t long before we realized that we were dealing with our first significant tornado of the day.
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The tornado moved southeast and became visible to our west when it reached our latitude.  We were watching radar closely and became very concerned about our welfare as it looked like the tornado would either continue southeast, or redevelop closer to us.  The decision was made to move south toward Union City and we likely made that decision just in time.  Traffic southbound was horrible and funneling people through the four way stop in Union City was difficult.  Had the tornado continued southeast, there would have been a whole bunch of us caught at the main intersection in Union City.  Lucky for us, but unlucky for others, the tornado turned east and then northeast as it crossed Highway 81.  The survey revealed that the tornado crossed the highway near and just south of where we were previously sitting.  As the tornado moved back toward I-40, it became the widest tornado of record and increased in intensity to EF5.  Tragically, several people / including storm chasers / were killed in this area.  I have another blog entry about that here: http://okweatherwatch.com/dave/?p=3212

Our stress level had only started to increase at this time.  We knew the tornado was moving toward the metro area and knew that it was difficult to see, so we were planning a course that would get us away from the storm and south of the congested area so we could target other storms forming to the west.  Little did we know that a series of events had already been set in motion that would cause us to change our plans numerous times over the next couple of hours.  Local television was advising people in the path of the tornado to flee south.  Many took that advice and we found ourselves stuck in what was basically the largest traffic jam ever to affect Oklahoma City.  A combination of the storm, river, and traffic flow (or non-flow) funneled us into the southwest side of OKC where we couldn’t break out for about an hour.  There are too many details to mention, but we were repeatedly impacted by RFD winds causing damage, and constantly ran into areas of serious flash flooding.  It was dark before we finally found a way out of the mess and got south on I-44 and wrapped around to the west into Mustang.  We had a few more flooding issues near Mustang before finding the turnpike north and home where we exhaustingly poured ourselves out of the car.

Doug put it best when he said while leaving, “Happy birthday Dave, let’s never do it again”.  I couldn’t agree more.