MOORE, Okla.—Last May, Kristy Rushing was at work when she first heard the reports a tornado had developed just southwest of the home she shared with her husband, James, and their five foster kids.
It wasn't the first time her house had been in the path of deadly weather. A mile-wide tornado, one of the most destructive captured on record, missed their home by mere blocks in May 1999—not long after they had moved in. Four years later, in May 2003, another tornado hit, wiping out a neighborhood a mile north.
“It missed us just by a hair those two times,” Rushing recalled.
But on May 20, 2013, her family wasn't so lucky. The monster tornado, nearly a mile and a half wide with winds in excess of 200 miles per hour, took dead aim at her neighborhood, obliterating virtually everything in its path.
Her home was reduced to splinters—15 years of life mercilessly destroyed in an instant. But Rushing was one of the fortunate ones. Her husband, a United Parcel Service worker who worked the night shift so he could care for their kids in the afternoon, had awoken just before the tornado hit and took shelter at Plaza Towers Elementary School directly across the street where their son was a student. Both were injured but miraculously survived even though the building was totaled. Others weren't so lucky.
In all, the storm killed 25 people—including seven third-graders at Plaza Towers—and injured nearly 400 more. While Rushing and her family had lost everything, at least they had their lives.
“And that was what was important, thank God, we still had each other,” Rushing said. “The other, it was just stuff.”
