By State › Oklahoma

Oklahoma: Overview

Download all of Oklahoma as PDF Print

Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in Oklahoma exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under Oklahoma go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

Moore, Oklahoma: struck by two EF5 tornadoes, 14 years apart

On May 3, 1999, an F5 tornado tore through Bridge Creek, Newcastle, and Moore, and mobile Doppler radar recorded winds as high as 321 mph inside it, the highest wind speed ever measured on Earth. The storm killed 36 people directly and caused roughly $1 billion in damage. Fourteen years later, on May 20, 2013, another EF5 tornado struck the same city of Moore directly, killing 24 people, including 7 children sheltering at Plaza Towers Elementary School when a wall collapsed. See the Risks page for the full data on both.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in Oklahoma: a genuine, practiced tornado shelter plan, an underground storm shelter or a specifically identified interior room, isn’t optional preparedness here, it’s a response to documented, repeated, top-of-scale tornado risk in the same communities. Moore’s experience shows that being hit by history’s most extreme tornado doesn’t make a location safe from the next one.

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