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CENTRAL REMEMBERS MAY 3, 1999
“We were dispatched on outages, and the storm looked really bad,” said Jeff Denton, Central Rural Electric Cooperative’s safety director. “We saw troopers and emergency vehicles flying by, I looked at Larry and asked, ‘I wonder if they know something we don’t.’”
It was only when lightning struck that apprentice lineman, Jeff Denton, and second-year lineman, Larry Gordon, saw the tornado and realized it had entered Central’s service area. Trailing the Tornado The two young linemen were on call the day that tornadoes swept across Oklahoma 25 years ago on May 3, 1999. They knew that a tornado was wreaking havoc across Oklahoma, but hadn’t realized the outages they were responding to were caused by one of the 74 tornadoes that touched down across Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas in less than 21 hours. “We drove into a wall of water and had to stop the truck,” Denton said. “After several minutes, it cleared
enough that we could drive. Once we hit Interstate 35, the ground was just bare. Trees, poles, the grass, everything was gone.” An F-4 tornado had touched down south of Crescent and made its way 19 miles northeast through Mulhall, ending north of Perry.
“It was a good thing we weren’t 10 minutes earlier,” Denton said. “Everything in its path was gone. Parts of foundation were all that was left of houses.”
“It was the most ominous tornado,” said Gordon, now Central’s smart grid technician. “We were 10 miles from the tornado and it took up the whole windshield.”
Assessing the Damage “We didn’t know how much damage we had at first, but we got a lot of calls,” said John Myers, Central’s right of way (ROW) superintendent. “At the time, when someone called, we would take notes on yellow pads. We had stacks of yellow notes and with each call, it would grow.”
The tornado touched down during the night and exceeded one mile in width at times.
Nearly 3,000 members throughout Central’s seven-county service area had lost power.
“When we saw the tornado, we were behind it,” Gordon said. “It was like the sky came to the ground.” Inside Central’s dispatch office, a team watched KWTV’s Gary England report on the tornado as it ripped through the service area. They called the linemen into the office until they could assess what to do next.
n SEE “CENTRAL REMEMBERS” PAGE 2