start smelling gas inside the building. evacuated us out of the building, and i took that chance, i know the teachers knew that i had my son, my son and i left. just kind of snuck out. we didn t want to get trapped. we were here for the may 3 every torna tornado and the sheer gridlock of people wanting to come and help, or to look, you could not move in the town, so we tried to get out. my daughter was home alone, and we jumped the power lines, wouldn t arcing, all appeared to be dead, we were very careful, got to the truck and able to make it home, which was half mile south of there. and your home is intact? yes, my home is fine. just a little bit south of it. where that video is is directly i would say my home is a half mile south of where that video is, and my son s school a half mile northeast. right between my daughter who was at home and my son at
probably has 50. it s going to be a big effort to clean up, but we ll get there. what have you learned about your community in the last 48 hours? they re a pretty tough group. of course, we had shelters open for people who lost their homes, that kind of thing. didn t have a lot of folks staying in the shelter the first night or two given the structures we think are damaged. we think they ve been taken in by family, they ve been taken in by friends, i m sure there are some taken in by kmecomplete strangers. this community will reach out to help their neighbors, and that s very rewarding to see. where were you when this happened? i was at my home in the northeast part of town. i heard the sirens, didn t think the weather looked too bad. i stood out on my front porch and literally heard the storm about a half mile south of my home. i suffered no damage and i m realizing today how terribly lucky i was. take me through that. you re the mayor, you re at home, and you think, okay, i
chad meyers is in the severe weather center. let s get right to chad on oklahoma. chad? we have a line of weather from kansas to texas right across the red river. we have multiple i counted eight a little bit ago severe thunderstorms all rotating that could put down tornadoes at any time. we do know that big tornadoes have been on the ground, tornadoes in excess of 150 miles per hour to the west of oklahoma city. one just to the west of el reno into oklahoma. that s just a suburb of oklahoma city and on toward guthrie. tornado emergency down near norman, oklahoma and more with a big tornado on the ground and another one down near washington. that tornado has been on the ground for a while. it is going to be one long night, because it is certainly not over, and in fact, with the heat of the day just now being 6:00 central time, it is just getting going for places east of i-35 into tulsa and eventually, yes, that word joplin right there, as the weather just rakes across o