craig fugate, fema administrator, thank you for being with us. we know you are on the ground serving the damage here. the need is great. we are grateful you are helping provide those in need here. thank you so much. thank you. as we told you, the national weather service revised the strength of this twister. it s now an ef-5. winds topping 200 miles per hour making one of the strongest storms ever to hit the u.s. we are joined by meteorologist peterson. edra, spell it out for us, again. how do they determine the strength of a tornado? it s a big misconception. we have seen video over and over where it starts small and grows so fast. there s a huge tornado out there. they cycle, they grow. they may intensify and weaken. you can see that so clearly here in this map. how do we figure out the damage? we go out afterwards. we survey the damage and say it
baby proud and keep pushing on, like i know she would want me to do. every loss of a child like that changes a family forever. it s hard to hear. it really is, and it gives you perspective on why people who lost a home knows so much more could be sacrificed in a storm like this. as we follow what happens with the tornado here in moore, oklahoma and hearing stories of loss, the worst is the children, so much damage and so little time. we ll take you up into the sky for a look overhead. where you can really clearly see this tornado s path. and also continue to hear the stories of the heroes in the disaster. so many. we ll meet a doctor who saved lives moments before the tornado ripped her hospital to shreds. it s an amazing story. you re watching a special edition of starting point, live from moore, oklahoma.
almost the same path through this community. this part of the community shows randomness and intensity of the tornado. some folks just holding on and then a block away has been spared and this part of the debris field ends at a school where children lost their lives. as remarkable as the devastation, what s more impressive is the resolve of the community to come back and the knowledge that they know how to recovery. they understand how devastating this is. and they ve lived it before. there is a steely confidence here among the people of moore, oklahoma. really remarkable. interesting to see the damage from above. the sky ohio look. and we see it in vivid terms here on the ground level. big picture and small picture. i went through this neighborhood we re standing in right now, and so many small signs of the lives changed and the devastation that s been caused.
families that are still looking, that have lost their children. i just can t imagine it. i work at a school, i m fortunate at the school i work, at the high school, we had a safe room. the may 3rd tornado destroyed the high school. we had a safe room, we were all in it. at the same time, my son was one mile away and there was no shelter and no safe room. my dad tried to pick him up, but they wouldn t let him leave because the storm was that close. i m grateful my dad got back home. all my family is safe. it s wonderful. we have a big concern because we need shelters. we need safe rooms for our kids. at the same time, i know that i just can t believe how many blessings and how strong our family, our friends and the support we ve got and how big our god is.
the path this tornado took, and the randomness, the violence, is so clear. take a look. we ll take you through the tornado s path from beginning to end. if you look down here, you will see a brown line, it starts with the debris field and goes in this direction. that is actually the tornado s trail. as you see it will get much more dramatic as we get to the populated area. you literally can trace your finger a line where the tornado went. the path is completely obvious. it s about a block and a half wide, and you notice it just by seeing everything that s destroyed. everything that looks just like paper on the ground, those are homes, timbers, roofs, those are cars. there are two major time components here. 16 minutes, the warning window before the tornado touched down and a ten-minute window, during which this went from heavy wind to a tornado having the ability to destroy everything in its path.