Phillip Wise (photo) chased one of the most ferocious tornadoes to touch down in Oklahoma in years. Through his windshield from a half-mile out, the Category 5 twister was not so much a funnel but a shapeless, swirling wall of mud, pieces of homes, and airborne cars and horses. He is not a thrill-seeking storm tracker, and he works for neither the National Weather Service nor the Weather Channel. He is a police officer, for 27 years and counting.
Lieutenant Wise, 52, pursued the tornado that flattened parts of an Oklahoma City suburb as if it were a perpetrator, trailing it in his patrol car because he knew there would be mass injuries and people in need in its wake. He was far from his normal terrain— the suburb of Bethany, twenty miles northwest of Moore— and, as an employee of the Bethany Police Department, there was nothing in his job description requiring that he risk his life chasing violent forces of nature outside his jurisdiction for his $62,000 annual salary.
But his pursuit led him to a destroyed 7-Eleven store, where he helped pull people from the rubble, some alive and some dead.
Across the country, firefighters, police officers and paramedics run toward danger while others run away from it. The danger is often a fire, a shooting, an explosion. In Tornado Alley, the first responders’ instinct is the same, but the danger is not— they shadow the storms while the twisters are on the ground, following them while others crouch in closets or shelters, hoping to be close enough to the destruction that they might save lives.
“We were self-deploying, basically,” Lieutenant Wise said.
“When the Murrah bombing happened in ’95, four of us just jumped in one police car and we were down there thirty minutes after it happened,” he said of the deadly attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City. “We get paid to do a job, and we do it. When tornadoes and bombs or whatever happens, we have to be there, because if we’re not, I think a lot of other people will die.”
Lieutenant Wise was in uniform and on duty at the Bethany police station, busy with paperwork, when word spread that a tornado was developing in southern Oklahoma City, where he lives. Watching the television in the lineup room, he heard that the tornado was lowering in Newcastle, about four miles from his house.
“I told my major, I said: ‘I’ve got to go home’,” Lieutenant Wise said. “I jumped in my police car and started heading home.” His home was fine, but then he drove to his mother-in-law’s neighborhood a couple of miles east when he realized the storm was headed in her direction. Her house was fine, too, but then he saw that the tornado was bound for Moore. He continued to pursue it, worried about the area near Moore Medical Center and the day care center inside it. “I wasn’t worried about me,” he said. “I’ve followed a bunch of them. If it’s going northeast, if you stay southwest of it, you’re going to be in good shape. You should be.”
The tornado cut across the intersection of South Telephone Road and Southwest Fourth Street, damaging the medical center and nearby homes and businesses. “I saw the debris,” he said. “Cars were in the air. There was a bunch of cars in the 7-Eleven parking lot. When I got there, there was three. The rest of them were behind 7-Eleven in the mud.”
He pulled up near the hospital. Children from the day care center were walking out in helmets, and a teacher told him everybody was accounted for. Surrounding him was what he described as mass hysteria, with crowds of people searching, even screaming, for their missing relatives amid destroyed buildings, bent traffic signals and downed power lines. He was more concerned with those severely injured or possibly buried in the rubble.
“If you’re standing and walking, you’re fine,” he said. “That day I probably lost it screaming at people fifteen times. ‘I need to get back to my house, my dog’s in there.’ We’ve got poles falling, we’ve got electricity lines, gas spewing. Some guy comes walking up smoking. I look at him and I go: ‘Really, dude? Can you not hear the hissing?’”
He heard people screaming for help at the 7-Eleven near the hospital. It had been a large property at a corner of the intersection, with several gas pumps, but it was now a seven-foot-high heap of twisted metal and beer cans. The canopy over the gas pumps collapsed, the steel beams that had held it up bent down like licorice sticks.
Lieutenant Wise— along with Major Brian Jennings of the Oklahoma City police and several civilians, including a retired police officer who lived nearby— started digging. He and the others pulled out two injured, mud-caked people and put them in the back of a pickup truck. “I tell the citizen— I don’t even know his name— Southwest Medical Center, get there now, and so he takes off,” he said, adding that he also commandeered a passing tow truck. “They were driving down Fourth and I made a guy run out and stop the wrecker and have him come over, so we could hook the big stuff so we could slide it off.”
But they were pulling debris out by hand, hoping to find a void, when they saw the foot of a baby. The infant boy was dead, as was his mother. There were tears, and a few of the people who had pitched in to help became so distraught that he asked them to go home. He stayed, and continued working the pile. They found five people alive, and three dead, in the wreckage of the 7-Eleven. He eventually learned that one of the survivors died as well.
It was 8 am on Tuesday when he finally went home, muddy and exhausted. He slept a few hours, then went back to the scene.
On Thursday evening, he was at home with his wife, when he saw, on Facebook, a picture of Megan Futrell, 29, with her four-month-old son, Case, the mother and baby they had found in the rubble. All the emotions he had set aside came rushing back. He stood up, fixed himself a drink and went out in the backyard, and he sat there, alone, for a long time.
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