0 call now to get up to sixteen hundred dollars back or 12 months deferred interest on select lennox home comfort systems. offer ends june 14th. plus download our free lennox mobile app with an energy-savings calculator. ♪ if your current system is 10 years or older, start planning now and take advantage of special financing. so call now to get up to sixteen hundred dollars back or 12 months deferred interest on select lennox home comfort systems. offer ends june 14th. and download our free lennox mobile app. lennox. innovation never felt so good. welcome back. you're looking at aerials of moore, oklahoma. we're going to have a lot more from this vantage point in a few minutes. i'm anderson cooper. we're live from moore, oklahoma. this is our special coverage of the ef-5 tornado that carved a 17-mile path through this area. there's a lot going on today. the medical examiner's office now lists ten children among the 24 people killed in monday's tornado. two of them were infants, 4 and 7 months old. the mayor of moore says the death toll is not expected to rise. now people in this devastated community must focus on both rebuilding their lives and burying their dead. it is a tough road to recovery. people here are leaning on faith and family. >> amongst the rubble and amongst the devastation, families huddled together pulling things out of the rubble, smiling the best they can. there's still tragedy. we lost life here. but families are picking themselves up. they're strong and resilient. a very, very strong faith. and we're going to move on. we have hope. >> oklahoma's emergency management office says that about 10,000 people were directly impacted by monday's tornado. right now fema has more than 400 personnel on the ground here trying to support the response. trying to make sure survivors get the federal assistance made available by the disaster declaration signed by president obama. now, the white house says the president is being updated on the tornado response throughout the day today. homeland security chief janet napolitano was going to come today to get a firsthand look at the destruction. we'll hear from her in a live news conference in about an hour. as i said, there's a lot to bring you up-to-date on. from the air you can actually trace the tornado's 17-mile path of devastation. lieutenant governor compared it to a giant lawn mower blade cutting its way across the community. the storm destroyed 2,400 homes, uprooted huge trees like they were weeds, cars tossed about. chris cuomo got an aerial view. take a look. >> right now we're at 2,500 feet above the ground. scientists say the debris from the tornado was ten times as high as we are right now into the air. look at the trees. it looks like people pulledlaid were weeding their garden, but those are huge old pine trees. cars littered along the trail. they weren't parked there. they were tossed like toys. you literally can trace with your finger a line where the tornado went. >> state officials say that insurance claims from the tornado will probably top $2 billion. those are early estimates. the mayor says he does not expect the death toll to climb. as i mentioned. but some people have not been able to reach loved ones since the tornado struck and they are anxious to try to get in contact with them. nick valencia joins us with that. nick, you've been talking to people who are trying to reach relatives in the area. what are you hearing from them? oklahoma hasn't just impacted - residents here, it's impacted residents in other states. yesterday i spoke by phone to a woman in gleeson, tennessee, who hasn't been able to get in touch with her sister since the storm hit on monday. >> my mind is everywhere. i was -- my boss actually pulled up the site. and she did that for me because i can't think straight. and i'm kind of in a fog. i don't want to believe that. i don't. but i can't reach her. i can't find her. i don't know where she is. and i don't know if she could get to me or get a hold of me or anything to let me know that she's okay. >> to complicate matters even more for people like erica sandoval, traditional lines of communication are spotty at best. it could very well be, anderson, her sister is in one of the shelters in neighboring counties, but so far she hasn't been able to get in touch with her. >> and it is important to point out because officials here are saying they believe most people have been accounted for. they don't believe the death toll is going to rise any more. so there's a lot of people displaced staying at friends' houses. their home phones have been destroyed. it could be they haven't been able to get in touch. >> that's exactly right. and we posed that to erica sandoval. she says she's hoping for the best. she has a motto in her family that no news is good news. interestingly enough she didn't realize she had a sister until 2001. her father was in the navy and fathered a child in the philippines. this woman, sandy, her sister called and contacted her out of the blue in 2001. it was a twist of fate she said that brought them together. she's hoping that the same twist of fate brings her back in her life. >> i've been getting a lot of e-mails and tweets from people asking about why there aren't more tornado shelters or safe rooms in this area. i know you talked with the mayor about that today. what'd he say? >> in an off camera interview the mayor of moore spoke to us exclusively, glenn lewis told us as soon as the cleanup process is complete, he plans to propose an ordinance that would require all new housing developments to have either a safe room or a shelter. coincidentally, anderson, glenn lewis was also the mayor of moore in 1999 when the devastated tornado shredded the community. he posed similar ordinances back then. because of that there were housing complexes here that survived the brunt of the damage. because of the neighborhood that we saw leveled by this tornado because it was an older community, it didn't have the same housing codes. so that could explain exactly why we saw the devastation we saw there. anderson. >> a lot of old houses weren't required to put in storm shelters. tornado was made worse when the only hospital in moore took a direct hit. this is what's left of the moore medical center. about 30 patients and staffers were inside when the tornado hit as well as a couple hundred people ran in the building and came apart around them. it's incredible that no one was hurt inside, no patients, no staff members. dr. sanjay gupta joins me now. you've been talking to the woman, the doctor who was in charge of getting everybody safe in there. >> yeah. and like you heard so many times, they didn't have very much warning, about ten minutes or so. they'd been watching television. then they got what's called a code black, which basically means the tornado's definitely coming. so several things happened at once. they moved interior staff members to the center away from the glass, also take mattresses and blankets and covered their heads, they simultaneously have to think about evacuation after the storm passes through and then set up a triage area in the parking lot for injuries. so all these things are happening literally within minutes. this woman 34 years old her name is stephanie barnhart and she put that together. she's lived here in oklahoma her whole life. she knows tornadoes, but there was nothing that could prepare her quite for like what she saw on monday. a totally different thing. >> we're outside the medical center now. i mean, it's amazing no one was hurt when you look at it. was the whole floor ripped off or the exterior structure? it looks like the exterior structure. >> yeah, but the interior of that floor is completely demolished and you have ceiling tiles. little things, we have some things very heavy for example on the second floor, that's not a place you want to be on the first floor because it could drop on the floor from above. i talked to someone yesterday as well who said he could not believe based on that type of damage -- >> they were putting you were saying mattresses on patients so they didn't get head wounds. >> that's one of the big things. you obviously want to protect your head, but patients who may not be feeling well or able to do this themselves to be able to give them some protection. and you're hearing not just from the hospital but all over the number of brain and head injuries was astonishingly and thankfully low. maybe just because of that training. >> already we've been watching they're trying to already clear up this area. they have recovery service of vehicles already in here. they're taking out some cars. it's obviously going to be a long time before that medical center is up and running again. >> yeah, a lot of the doctors cars are flipped over, ended up in the ambulance basin or inside the hospital, this won't be working for a wliel. but she was working immediately at the next morning taking care of others. >> it is extraordinary with the death toll being 24, 24 people have lost their lives. a terrible, terrible tragedy. but when you see the level of devastation, when you see the wide path of this storm, it really could have been so much worse. >> yeah. i think it's going to be an interesting sort of case study. i was talking to some of the storm assessment people about things that didn't go right and the things that did, as you point out it's a terrible number, but it could have been worse. why was it so slow e low? what worked here and how could it extend throughout the country. >> one of the things the governor was talking about being thankful for the media about getting the word out. but some places there had been hours of kind of warning a big storm was coming. >> as you know having covered these, it's very hard to predict. but people do seem to heed the warnings a little bit more so here. certainly in hospitals, but in other places as well. so that probably helped. >> sanjay, good to have you. thanks very much. coming up, a lot of well-known people lending a hand to the victims here in moore, oklahoma, including new york mets pitcher. he's going to explain his connection to the area next. our special coverage continues. have hail damage to both their cars. ted ted is trying to get a hold of his insurance agent. maxwell is not. he's on geico.com setting up an appointment with an adjuster. ted is now on hold with his insurance company. maxwell is not and just confirmed a 5:30 time for tuesday. ted, is still waiting. yes! maxwell is out and about... with ted's now ex-girlfriend. wheeeee! whoo! later ted! online claims appointments. just a click away on geico.com.
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