NORMAN — The power generated by a tornado is hard to wrap the mind around.
They can scoop up entire houses and fling them thousands of feet. Big rigs are blown apart like papier mâché toy trucks, and even cows have been known to take a ride they didn’t sign up for.
And with at least 10 souls lost to the tornadoes that ripped through central Oklahoma on Tuesday, they can be — and often are — deadly.
Even though Norman and much of Cleveland County was spared during the outbreak Tuesday, it was affected in a different way.
Shortly after tornadoes ripped through Goldsby and Blanchard, odd debris — anything from receipts to tree bark to insulation — began falling from the sky.
In one northwest Norman neighborhood called Castlerock, a ragged piece of a memory floated down from the sky and landed in Bobby Hare’s lawn.
Hare, who works in The Transcript’s advertising department, said he found a photo near his home Tuesday. He believes it likely came from the tornado damage in towns like Newcastle, Goldsby and Blanchard.
The people in the photo — a little girl and a woman in what appears to be a classroom setting — are strangers to Hare.
“It was all tattered and torn and covered with red mud,” he said of the partial photograph he recovered Tuesday. “We washed it off and you could kind of see who was in it.”
The photo wasn’t the only thing floating around Castlerock that day.
“You could see all kinds of stuff floating around in the sky,” Hare said. “Branches, twigs and leaves were kind of floating down out of the sky ... it was kind of freaky.”
Hare also saw fiberglass insulation, roofing fabric and “all kinds of paper floating around.”
Debris flung through the air by the tornadoes Tuesday was reportedly found all over Norman, including near the library, the Cleveland County courthouse and the Max Westheimer Airport. A two-foot piece of wooden paneling was found on the lawn of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church on Porter Avenue.
Sheriff Joe Lester said a cloud of debris made its way to his neighborhood shortly after twisters devastated parts of McClain County.
“It was just a bunch of papers and leaves and grass and stuff like that,” Lester said. “It wasn’t anything you could take a picture of, but it dumped it all over the neighborhood.”
At the downtown Norman offices of Boyd Security, another photo was found.
But unlike Hare’s experience, this find has a resolution.
Charles Bailey, a Boyd Security employee, said one of the company’s security officers found an old photograph in the parking lot of the business, which is on Comanche Street.
“It was black and white and it apparently just blew in with the rest of it,” he said.
According to Bailey, the debris arrived “right as the storms rolled in.”
After finding the photograph, he posted it on Facebook on a page titled Oklahoma Storms Lost And Found.
After about a day, a Lexington woman contacted him through Facebook, claiming the photo belonged to her husband.
“It’s pretty cool,” Bailey said. “They’re only going to have a few photographs left, so it’s nice to have found the owners.”
