care of. a large abundance of love and care coming out of the community. how soon, when did you seek shelter to from this storm? was it a few minutes? when did you go to your shelter? we didn t get into a shelter yet. we re watching it in the house on tv. it is not far from our back door. when the sirens go off is when we ll decide to get in it. tammy glasgow, thank you so much and for your heroism last week. we ll check in with you later. o.j. cnn meteorologist chad myers is driving around the area. chad, we heard from a local media, one of our affiliates there, there looks to be a tornado forming on the ground east of perkins about an hour northeast of oklahoma city. we also heard word of a rope tornado. explain what that is. a rope tornado literally looks like a rope from the bottom of the cell of the
the storm chaser said he was shocked when he saw this thing grow before his eyes. absolutely. i was home watching it. it went from rope to an ef-4, ef-5 and then a rope tornado in just about 40 minutes. and the damage, of course, has been incredible. one of the things of course you re familiar with the radar that we show you here on cnn frequently. and you re familiar with the colors, right? the deeper the colors, orange means heavy rainfall and sometimes hail. this should not be here. what this is nonmeteorological. this is not precipitation. what it is, of course, is nonmeteorological targets, which means people s homes, whatever is left of them, flying up in the air. the radar is bouncing off of that material and coming back to us. and it is indicated as that. because the hail core usually is to the north here. this is where that circulation was. and as jonathan and suzanne mentioned, at one point, two miles wide. i was watching doors, houses, just spinning around. the kind of stu
violent damage associated with it and it is coming directly into the town of prague. indication is that the tornado is trying to come down to the ground. that was about 45 seconds to a minute ago. it was three west of prague and now it s about a mile and a half west of prague. who is that? let s go back to emily s live stream. she has a nice visual on the wall cloud on the northeast side of shawnee. caller: we re on 18 and i-40 and while this has got it s act together it was rough rotation but now look at this lowering. it s very well defined and we re planning on hopping on i-40 unless there s still a way that we can t. i believe that we can still hop on i-40. we re following this. very ominous lowering here and guys, just o 10 or 15 minutes ago we caught a rope tornado. so this obviously is the
of this. one very large tornado and then that rope tornado. and then it was trying to cycle and didn t quite do it. right now we re heading east. we have not seen any debris yet. but i will keep my eyes peeled for it as we re trying to follow this storm as it quickly races off to the east. that s good. that s a really, really good report. if you didn t come across any debris. caller: not yet. not yet. at 18 and 40. that s really very good news at least right there at 18 and 40 because that tornado tracked very, very close to 18 and 40. and as of right now emily has not seen any debris from that initial lead tornado. now she is tracking still eastbound she is tracking that circulation right there. let s go to kevin and linda live at the news desk. initial reports of the first fatality. we talked about how dangerous the storm is. the red cross received word of a
funnel cloud trying to reform and take a different shape, a rope tornado, and you saw the wedge form tornado so, again, this is all the dynamics in tornado alley working together, the southern winds and a power much jet stream with upper level winds from the southwest giving us the rotation we need in different levels of the atmosphere. that is why we are seeing, you can actually see the rotation with this cloud. i believe it looks like the fund them has dissipated here but, again, some of the damage reports we are getting from wellston and luther, oklahoma, all north of oklahoma city, the damage is quite impressive from what we are seeing in early reports. we have folks that are going to go on the scene. they will assess what we are dealing with. all the people that live in this neighborhood are seeking