tornado warnings since the 1950s, this will probably go down as one of the two or three greatest fatalities for a single tornado. you know, when you compare the cost of the damage and the loss of life, i think that houses can be replaced but people can t. a lot of people think this may top joplin. the most expensive tornado we had at $2.8 billion. and they re saying this one may top it. hopefully a loss of life. we get newspapers from all across the country here at nbc and morning joe. i just want to show you a couple of them. because we always get a few iconic images from these kind of stories. this is on the cover not only the u.s. post by the daily news as well as the washington post and wall street journal. and, of course, children there s at least 20 confirmed children that have died from the storm from that school. i want to go to mike bettes who is in moore right now. mike, i know you ve been moving all over the place here. can you give us a sense of the vibe on th
hour the congressman saying it is still a search and rescue. they hope that somebody has somehow found a way to survive in the middle of all of that. it s just one area. there is house after house after house after house after building because usually in tornadoes you have a swath, an area, one massive building. everywhere here. yeah. everywhere. roofs have been ripped off. and you can see this, they ve already been through all of these homes. they found some survivors in some of the homes. but they still are going to come back later and search to see if there are any fatalities. and this happened city block after city block. we are right now about to get hit by another storm, willie, which is going to make rescue operations even more difficult. tell us, get us up to date on what the president, the governor and local officials are doing. well, the president of the united states took an important step last night when he declared this a federal disaster. that does a lot of thin
children victims trapped at the bottom of that school right now. this is eagle drive right here, we understand there could be as many as half dozen more fatalities on this street alone in this area. the emergency personnel have backed out of the school, they re pulling in more vehicles, they re backing people away. and i understand they re going to start pulling these tiny victims out of the rubble here shortly. it s too difficult, lance. lance, hang in there, my friend. that was kfor veteran reporter lance west reporting yesterday taking in the terrible news and having a hard time keeping his emotions together. i don t blame him. coming up on morning joe, we re going to have the mayor of moore, oklahoma, glenn lewis is going to join us. he certainly has insight in this town s history. the long-time mayor in moore, oklahoma, he was here in 1999 for what they call the may 3rd storm. we ll talk about to the
lightning show. we heard thunder all night and again today. last week, we thought we d seen a terrible tornado and we did, tore up big parts of the state. and just as they re starting to recover from that, yesterday happens and then again today they re expecting some storms. it was interesting to see the front page of the paper here today. there was a storm here on may 3rd, 1999 which is viewed as the worst, most powerful tornado in the history of the world. we were saying, people around here said that was the day that lived in infamy for them. everybody remembers the day. winds over 300 miles an hour. the front page of the paper today said worse than may 3rd. in terms of devastation and displacement of people, we ll see about loss of life in the end. well, there s a tick-tock a local station did yesterday to show us exactly how this killer storm went down. it is a mile wide debris cloud. it is a mile wide wedge. violent tornado, the only way
half here is the southern portion of the destruction. literally all of the houses in here, this, folks, is all gone. there s none of that remaining. that is all what has been destroyed. that is literally about 1/2 mile wide through that region. now, as we jump interstate 35 to the other side of moore, oklahoma, these other elementary schools were hit too. apple creek elementary school also highland east junior high school. there was a shopping center up here. had a bunch of pharmacies, cvs, walgreen s, lowe s, that was on the northern edge, and a lot of this devastated too throughout the region. thankfully, the students were safe in those schools in those areas. it was just a helpless situation as the storm rolled on through. now, the radar, joe is talking about this. you can see at the top of the show, some of the flashes of lightning, little white streaks you see on the map here are the lightning strikes. i have more highlighted right in here. they re dry for the time being. but this