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The month started slow without much in the way of tornado activity. A brief flurry of storminess occurred as the atmosphere perked up around May 11 and 12, but most of the storms were hailers. That was around the time Aaron arrived in Oklahoma City. Without much to do, we passed the hours driving around the area.
We stayed in Moore, a suburb of Oklahoma City on the south side of town that had been largely razed on May 3, 1999, when an F5 tornado tore through the city. Thirty-six people died as the mile-wide cylindrical buzz saw of 300 mph winds obliterated neighborhoods and stomped city blocks into rubble. It was the first time the National Weather Service had ever declared a tornado emergency, meteorologists wracking their brains on how to deliver enhanced wording that would convey the life-or-death nature of the situation.
Moore’s terse history with twisters only continued from there. An F3 tornado swung through the city again on May 8, 2003, knocking down some of the homes that had just been rebuilt. Yet another high-end tornado—and the last EF5 to touch down nationwide in a decade—claimed twenty-four lives in Moore on May 20, 2013, prompting the issuance of another chilling tornado emergency reminis- cent of a fateful afternoon fourteen years prior.