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Finding shelter from the storm

OMAHA, Neb. — They brought us scraps of news and cups of water.

Toddlers scampered in makeshift playgroups, oblivious to the dangers above. Their parents settled in against the cinder-block walls, or on the conveyor belts, which on a normal evening would have been filled with luggage moving from airplane back to traveler, but which this evening were motionless. There was no luggage moving. There were no planes moving.

Only the wind was moving—the wind and the lightning and the torrential rain.

We could see none of that, but we could hear the thunder that came with it. Even through the cinder blocks, deep inside the sturdy building, we could hear the thunder, in sudden cracks and long, rolling rumbles.

“Please proceed calmly,” the announcement had said, and that’s what we did, looking for the “Tornado Shelter” signs posted throughout the Eppley Airfield concourse. We were getting used to this, if one can ever get used to nature lurching confoundingly out of control. This was our second evacuation of the evening. The first, just minutes long, had sent us from our boarding gate to the bottom of a nearby stairwell. This one was different.

We were near the baggage-claim area when this second warning came; our flights had been cancelled, and we had resigned ourselves to another night on the road, waiting for the vans that would take us to nearby motels. Then the sirens sounded, and the voice was back on the public-address system.

“Please proceed calmly…”

Someone with a name tag had a key and a security code; he opened a door. One by one, several dozen of us squeezed through a narrow metal turnstile and found ourselves in the bowels of the baggage system, pale cinderblock and soot-black floors. Across the room were the rubberized slats that, in normal times, part like theater curtains and produce those magical parades of bags for expectant passengers.

But this was not one of the normal times. The slats stayed unparted as we hunkered down, backstage, and waited.

The announcements would come every few minutes, an anonymous voice over the public-address system, and we’d break off our conversations with strangers to try to make out the words: The airport was still under a tornado threat. We should remain in our shelters until the threat is lifted.

We even had a visitor—the airport’s director of operations, who calmly moved from cluster to cluster with the latest word on the storm track, and his best estimate of how much longer we’d have to stay put. On his second visit, he even brought a computer printout with him—a map of Omaha and the surrounding counties, the better to explain precisely where the storm had been, and where it was likely to go next. And he sent in water, trays filled with cool refreshment as the room got warmer and stuffier, as the toddlers staggered past their bedtimes and started wearing down. He did everything he could to make our stay tolerable.

And he told us about the Boy Scout camp.

A tornado had hit the Boy Scout camp just 60 miles north of us, just across the river in Iowa. Thirty or 40 injured, he told us. And fatalities—that was the word he used: fatalities.

The room was warm, and stuffy. By the time they finally announced that the worst of the storm had passed and we were free to leave, it would grow still warmer, and still stuffier. We would all be wearing down.

But we were safe. We would spend the night in a bed. A motel bed, perhaps, but a bed.

We felt lucky.

Rick Horowitz is a syndicated columnist. You can write to him at rickhoro@execpc.com.