On the afternoon of April 4, Kelvin Droegemeier, PhD, received an atypical email. OU freshman Julianne Wylie was writing to tell him about her weekend. “This is Julie from your first semester Severe and Unusual Weather Class,” it began. “I have a story to tell you! …I experienced my first tornado, unfortunately.”
Wylie had returned home to Sherwood, Arkansas (part of the Little Rock metro) on a whim. It was the weekend before Easter, and she was scheduled to head home the following weekend for the holiday, but something drew her home anyway. That whim quite possibly saved lives. Over the course of that Friday day, Wylie being in Arkansas with her family would make life-changing decisions possible and offer solace to family members who might not have had it otherwise.
The day started out normally, like severe weather days often do. Wylie was aware of the possibility for thunderstorms, but it was the usual background noise known to those who live in areas prone to severe spring weather. She had a busy day ahead of her, paperwork to pick up and family members to see.
At lunch with her aunt, who was also in the area visiting, the topic of weather came up. Wylie checked the radar app on her phone. Already, things were looking like more than a standard thunderstorm.
“I was looking at our coursework from Dr. [Droegemeier] and I was pulling up what a supercell looks like on a radar.” After comparing with the live radar data on her phone, she advised her aunt to end lunch early, leave Little Rock, and drive at least part of the way home. Her aunt listened. Hours later, the hotel her aunt had been staying in was destroyed by a tornado.
After some errands, Wylie returned to her mother’s home in Sherwood, Arkansas, joining her middle sister who was already home. The moment she stepped out of her car, sirens started sounding. The pair decided it was time to get their youngest sister from her elementary school down the street. In the approximately 20 minutes it took for them to do so, the sky, she said, completely changed. “It was orange, it was dark. It was crazy how fast everything was moving.”
She pulled up the radar again and was able to identify a squall line. “I noticed there was a hook, and I knew what that was. There was a huge rotation in the middle of it.”
Power and service became spotty. Wylie wasn’t able to access the news or use the radar app on her phone after that, and while the sisters were able to call their mom for a brief period of time, all they heard from her was “Buildings coming down, take cover,” before they lost connection with her.
Wylie knew she had to keep a calm, for herself and for her family. The three sisters sheltered for almost two hours in an interior closet, covering up with all the pillows Wylie could find.
She received a call from her father, who watched a Trader Joe’s across the street from his own place of business get demolished. Then she received a call from her stepfather, who works in North Little Rock and watched the tornado travel down the interstate.”
“You could hear the windows rattling while he was on the phone with us.”
Then the wind began to pick up in Sherwood. Wylie worked to keep her sisters as unaware as possible of the progressing weather while also keeping them safe. She was still unable to use her radar, and only knew, based on the conversation with her stepfather, that the tornado was headed toward her.
“The house was shaking, the wind was blowing, it sounded like there were trains outside.”
When Wylie was finally able to exit the house, her mother’s neighborhood was seemingly undamaged. Even the trampoline in their backyard was still in place. “But then you looked on the news… and literally a neighborhood over from where we were was destroyed.”
In the aftermath of the storms, everything was a mess of half information: phone calls, discussions about news footage passed back and forth. It was more than three hours until she heard her mother was safe.
“That was the worst part,” she said, “not knowing where everybody was and sporadically hearing but not knowing what was going on.”
She heard from one family member that they had seen Wylie’s mother’s office building on the news, and that her car was the only recognizable one in the parking lot—all the others were damaged beyond driving. They had not heard from her mother in hours. When they finally got through to her, she relayed that she’d watched a woman pulled out of the building by the force of the storm. “Half [of her building] was gone… all the windows of her car were broken.”
Her father was unable to return to his home for over 24 hours because fallen trees prevented access to the neighborhood. When Wylie was finally able to visit, she said she didn’t recognize the place.
She said the experience of having a tornado hitting her community has changed the way she sees other storms. “Whenever you watch storm damage on tv… it doesn’t really hit as hard because it’s not a place you know, you don’t know what it looked like before,” said Wylie. “You don’t know what it’s like until you’re there and you’re watching and seeing it.”
Roads, homes, and schools that she was familiar with were damaged and destroyed. The Sonic she used to frequent was shut down for a week. Her town had no power for days, and remaining streetlights remained unlit.
Wylie is a criminology pre-law major. She came in with several college credits, and only needed to take one science course without a lab. “My dad had told me about the National Weather Center, and I would much rather take [Severe and Unusual Weather] than physics.”
Severe and Unusual Weather, METR 2603, was one of the first classes she took during her first fall semester at OU, and one she ended up loving. “Dr. Droegemeier will probably be one of my favorite professors for my college career.” Wylie utilized office hours regularly for help with the math portions of the course she felt less than confident about.
Severe and Unusual Weather is a meteorology class for non-majors. It covers basic concepts of the atmosphere and severe weather topics such as tornadoes, hail, lightning, winter weather, hurricanes and tropical weather, and climate change and the way it relates to severe weather. The idea is to provide a basic understanding of severe weather to non-meteorologists.
The class also includes two guest lectures, one concerning the severe weather warning process and another about risk decision making and social and behavioral science.
Droegemeier says what happened to Wylie—being able to practically apply what she learned in this course—is exactly what he hopes for from the class. “My goal in this class isn’t to teach these kids how to become scientists or experts in meteorology, it’s to help them do exactly what she did. She has a basic understanding of storms, of what to do, and how the atmosphere works, and she applied it.”
“People are fascinated by the weather, and they’re fascinated by extreme weather,” said Droegemeier. “And we live it, we live in a laboratory, we experience it every day.” For this reason, Droegemeier wants all sorts of students to take this course. “There are no prerequisites. I want music majors, I want business majors, I want people who don’t have a math background or any experience with physics.”
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“First tornado and hopefully my last!” were the closing words to Wylie’s email. Hopefully, indeed. But if it’s not, Wylie’s certainly prepared; she’s got METR 2603 in her back pocket.
By Kathryn Gebauer
Article Published: Tuesday, May 9, 2023
