Dr. Jennifer Brown is a former Vancouver resident now living in Oklahoma City. Her home is about 20 miles away from Moore, Oklahoma, where at least 24 people were killed after a tornado flattened homes and demolished an elementary school.
While Brown says her family’s home is still standing, and her husband and two young sons are fine, the events of the past couple of days was a very scary experience to live through. Three nurses at the clinic where she works also lost everything in the tornado.
“I woke up this morning thinking it was all a bad dream,” said Brown.
She and her husband were at home on Monday, where they woke up to blue and sunny skies. But at about 2:30 p.m. everything changed.
“Twenty miles seems like far way away, but I’m from Saskatchewan, which is just about as flat as Oklahoma and you can kind of see forever down here because it’s just prairies,” said Brown. “And we had been hearing warnings all week that there was going to be some severe weather, that conditions would be right for tornadoes on the weekend, and everybody needs to prepare, get your shelters prepared.”
A tornado touched down and killed two people in Shawnee, Oklahoma on Sunday, but the worst was yet to come.
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Once conditions changed on Monday afternoon, and Brown and her husband set out to collect their two young boys from daycare, they had to drive through hail, thunder, rain and lightning to reach their sons.
“While we were driving we were listening to the radio, listening to the weather updates, because when you’re here, I mean a tornado can kind of touch down anywhere,” said Brown.
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“It was while we were on the road that we heard the warning that said ‘Anybody in Moore, you have 15 minutes, you absolutely have to get underground now. There is no way that you can survive if you’re anywhere above ground now.”
Brown said at this point the sky was dark and the tornado sirens had been going off for some time.
They managed to reach the daycare and collect their kids. They were huddled together with six other classmates and their teacher, all crying.
“Everything is ten times worse when you have kids involved,” said Brown.
Nine children are listed among the fatalities in Moore, and Brown said for her, that was the worst part of Monday’s storm, the loss of so many young lives.
“I think the whole community just woke up in shock today,” she said. “Although tornadoes are pretty common here and people lose their houses, they lose the shirt off their back, they lose everything all the time, the communities are so well prepared that loss of life is actually really rare.”
Brown said her husband was working in the ICU at the hospital in downtown Oklahoma the night of the tornado in Moore and she came in this morning to relieve him and provide assistance.
Being a former Vancouver and Saskatoon resident, she is still not used to this severe type of weather, but it is something taught to children at a very young age. “My two-year-old is probably more prepared for a tornado than me,” she said.
But they have a plan in place as a family and Brown said all families do in the area.
“If you don’t have a storm shelter, then your neighbour has a storm shelter,” she added.
While this may not be the last tornado Brown and her family have to live through, they still want to call Oklahoma home.
“A lot of people in Canada think we’re crazy to be down here in the first place,” she said. “We love Oklahoma and we love the people here. I don’t know why God decided they had to get the short end of the stick when it came to severe weather, but we definitely love calling this place home for now and we’ll be here another couple of years yet.”
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