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Latest Updates on Oklahoma Tornadoes; Joplin Sends Aid to Oklahoma.

Aired May 21, 2013 - 11:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: -- remain on the ground, there for them, beside them, as long as it takes for there are homes and schools to rebuild, businesses and hospitals to reopen, parents to console, first responders to comfort, and of course frightened children who will need our continued love and attention. There are empty spaces where there used to be living rooms and bedrooms and classrooms and in time we're going to need to refill those spaces with love and laughter and community.

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JESSICA YELLIN, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: John, there is already significant federal presence there on the ground beginning overnight. There are teams that were deployed from Pima, the nation's top emergency response system, the top executive that runs the organization is on a plane to Moore, Oklahoma, right now to help orchestrate the federal response. I will point out one thing the president did say. They did activate urban search and rescue teams from Texas, Nebraska, and Tennessee. Now these are specially trained people who are not just experts in urban search and rescue meaning pulling the kinds of debris and damage you get in city environments off of people and helping them in a crisis but they've been deployed to Haiti in the past, to Sandy and now they are there in Oklahoma at the president's behest.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: That experience will be so crucial here as the people here in this city try to put pieces of their lives back together. We've seen the federal presence here. I see National Guard driving through the streets overnight and well into this morning.

Jessica Yellin at the White House. Thank you so much for being with us this morning.

Again, as we look behind us right now, people going through their homes trying to salvage what they can. The aftermath of the storm just simply devastating. 24 people killed. Nine of them children. We'll bring you the latest updates on the devastation here in Moore, Oklahoma, when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: Welcome back to Moore, Oklahoma, everyone. I'm John Berman. I'm standing in what used to be a home. We've been standing in front of this home for a while. We had to come back and talk to the people here who have been digging through this debris all morning. This is Chad. He grew up here. Your parents still live here. Let me first ask you, are they OK?

CHAD, TORNADO SURVIVOR: They're over there digging in the rubble right now.

BERMAN: Your brother is there and your wife is there. Everyone is here hard at work.

CHAD: Yes, sir.

BERMAN: What's this like for you right now?

CHAD: I don't think we've really processed what's truly happened. We're just trying to salvage everything we can. What we can carry out. We can't get a vehicle in here. We're trying to carry everything out. Pictures, keepsakes, mementos.

BERMAN: I saw your brother trying to push out a dryer. Are you trying to save that?

CHAD: No. We don't care about that. Just irreplaceable stuff.

BERMAN: We're standing on things like the great recipes cookbook. It's your childhood here.

CHAD: Yep. Like I said, we have been here since '91. We're just trying to get the 20 years of stuff out of here that can't be replaced.

BERMAN: Since we've been here I've seen your family. I don't think I've seen a frown on any of your faces. You have been smiling and chatting as you go through this. How do you keep your spirits so high?

CHAD: Being thankful that everyone is OK. The stuff that got broken is replaceable. We saved a lot of pictures. Almost all of the photo frames. All of the important stuff. Things handed down from my grandparents. We've saved all that. We're thankful.

BERMAN: Where were all of you when the storm hit?

CHAD: I was on my way back into Newcastle. We turned off and let it pass. It was in front of us. My kids and wife were in the storm shelter. It turned from our house and hit my parents. They were well away from it because they were at work downtown.

BERMAN: What was it like when you found out how bad it was here?

CHAD: We were watching the news coverage last night. We couldn't get back in here. As we were watching the news we saw the hospital across the street, the movie theater, the 7-eleven were all leveled. I told my parents to be prepared for the worst. BERMAN: I can't imagine anything being worse than this in terms of your home. I don't know -- you can't see from where the camera is but a there's a lazy boy. There's a sofa down there somewhere. There's a cabinet over there. I don't know -- what is this?

CHAD: This used to be a wall between the ding room and living room.

BERMAN: Used to be a wall between dining room and living room.

CHAD: We're in the middle of the living room right now. Dad's chair. Mom's chair. Sofa over there.

BERMAN: OK. Thank you so much for being with us. We're so glad that you are OK. So glad your family is OK. We wish you the best of luck. Is there anything you would like America to know? Any help you would like?

CHAD: Just send your donations to the Red Cross. There are a lot of people that need your help. We're good. Thank you.

BERMAN: Appreciate it.

Chad was saying the hospital is not far from here. That also suffered just terrible damage in this storm last night.

Let's go to Pamela Brown who is at the Moore Medical Center right now.

Hey, Pamela.

PAMELA BROWN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey there, John. The search and rescue teams have their work cut out for them. The conditions out here are picking up. We've seen lightning. The wind is picking up. We're seeing debris, loose debris right behind me here. And it's really a dangerous situation for the search and rescue teams. I spoke to one earlier who said not only do they have to deal with these new weather conditions but also the concern of chemicals downed power lines, natural gas in a lot of these sites and right behind me here is a bowling alley and there are bowling balls throughout this area right behind me here. You can see the whole structure of the bowling alley just thrown apart from the tornado here yesterday. Emergency exit door over there. The base, the entire infrastructure is completely obliterated from the tornado and over here to my left this is where my bowling alley used to be. This is just one example of so many throughout here in Moore, Oklahoma, of what we're seeing.

Another are in that we spent a lot of time focusing on is the other elementary school that is in the direct path in the tornado. That is plaza towers elementary school and that's where we learned that several children were killed there and search and rescue teams have been there sifting through the rubble nonstop looking for anymore survivors. We've been speaking to parents who had kids in school yesterday at two elementary schools in that direct path. One mother said she ran to the scene and saw her son crouched down just frozen there on the ground with his hands over his head.

Another mother was frantically searching for her child. Here's what she had to say.

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BROWN: You're looking for your son right now, aren't you?

UNIDENTIFIED MOTHER: His name is Dylan Zachary Hall.

BROWN: He was -- where was he?

UNIDENTIFIED MOTHER: He was at the Plaza school.

BROWN: So he was at Plaza Towers Elementary. His name is Dylan Zachary Hall.

UNIDENTIFIED MOTHER: Dylan.

BROWN: He's how old?

UNIDENTIFIED MOTHER: He's 13. I haven't seen him since school. I know his step-mom was in the cellar at her house. I lost contact with her. They are supposed to send people over there. I don't know if she's still in the cellar or not. I can't find my son.

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BROWN: We can see here -- we're going to take a live look here. The search and rescue team that I was speaking about earlier here on the scene. They're at Moore Medical Center. We were just listening. They were motivating each other saying hang in there. Stick together. If conditions pick up, you know, be safe. Go to a safe area. Here at Moore Medical Center, we know that 30 patients were evacuated here yesterday after the tornado. After the damage was sustained, the patients were taken out. Most of the patients were here for outpatient reasons. Again, this scene here that we're seeing is what the picture is all over Moore, Oklahoma -- John?

BERMAN: You see the size and scope of this rescue and recovery effort. In some cases you see scores of workers picking up the pieces sifting through rubble and then you come to a place where I am where you see a family picking through the pieces trying to sort through their belongings, recover pictures, and the like.

One of the things that's made the job a little more difficult over the last several minutes is it was raining here fairly hard. That rain seems to have passed right now. We want to get a sense of where the Moore severe weather is headed. Could there be more storms on the way here?

Let's go to Chad Myers now in the weather center.

Chad, what's in store?

CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: There's more weather coming to you. It's not going to be a tornado. There's more weather developing in western Oklahoma moving your way. If you stand outside right now and you're in Oklahoma City or Moore, it's 60 degrees. It's humid. It's 60 degrees. That's not the 85 or 90 that you had yesterday. The air mass has changed. Potential for tornadoes will be well south into Texas into southern Oklahoma. That's where our first tornado watch box is. Back out here to the west. This is about Weatherford. Another storm coming your way. There will be lightning. There will be wind. There may be small hail. This is the setup that we had yesterday. The cold air was here. Right through here, through the plains, that's where the severe weather happened. That's where the tornadoes happened. Today this entire front has moved to the south 150 miles so the severe weather will be down into parts of Shreveport, into Dallas, Little Rock and points north from there. This is how it will set up. Biggest area Waco back toward Austin. This is moderate risk. Highest risk. There is still risk. Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, St. Louis it Paducah, this is a large weather system. Thousands of miles across making severe weather today from all of the way from Ontario to Texas -- John?

BERMAN: That is a large swath of the country that should be on the lookout and be extra careful today. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. You're hearing more pieces and glass being sprayed everywhere as this family picks through their house. Our live continuing coverage of the aftermath of this Oklahoma City tornado continues right after the break.

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BERMAN: Welcome back to CNN's live continuing coverage of this devastating tornado in Moore, Oklahoma. I'm standing in a flattened neighborhood right now as people pick through pieces of their homes to find whatever they can amid the devastation. The Oklahoma City medical examiner's office says they have 24 confirmed fatalities. Nine of those are children sadly. Those numbers could change over the next several hours. There have been 145 people hospitalized. A lot of injuries to talk about. A lot of danger literally flying through the area.

Let's go to CNN's Elizabeth Cohen in Atlanta right now.

Elizabeth, give me a sense of what kind of injuries, what kind of damage normally you will see from a tornado like this.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: People have actually studied this. What they found is that people are either injured by debris, by things flying at them, or they're injured from the actual impact of the tornado, the tornado picking them up and putting them down. The injuries are sort of roughly half and half they found in some studies. It's a huge array. You could be injured just a scrape or you could have a crush injury, a part of your body could actually be crushed. So it's a really huge array and one of the most common injuries is actually stepping on nails in the aftermath in this phase of a tornado.

BERMAN: Funny you should say that. Standing right by my food is this log with these nails sticking up here. I don't know if you can see that. I had to look out as I saw this. That's a common injury. You have to be careful here. Overnight people have been digging through the rubble here, Elizabeth. We were speaking with the lieutenant governor of Oklahoma earlier this morning. He said he didn't want to get caught up in rescue versus recovery effort but at this point what hope is there for survival?

COHEN: You know, as we've seen in other catastrophes, John, people can survive for quite a while. I remember being in Haiti and it was many days after the earthquake and they found her alive. It does happen. You don't want to say it's easy. You don't want to say it's common but it does happen. We saw in Bangladesh in that terrible catastrophe with that young woman that lived long after anyone thought any one could live. Each situation is hope. No one here is giving up hope. It doesn't mean they're not realistic. All it means is that they continue to dig, continue to look for survivors here and they are working as hard as they possibly can.

Elizabeth Cohen, in Atlanta, thank you so much.

Elizabeth talking about some places that has been through experiences like this, awful experiences like this. One of those places was Joplin, Missouri, where two years ago tomorrow, I believe, they lived through a horrific tornado. More than 100 people were killed there. What lessons did they learn and what did they have to tell the people of Moore, Oklahoma now? When we come back, we're going to speak to the city manager in Joplin, Missouri. Stay with us.

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BERMAN: Welcome back, everyone. This is CNN's continuing live coverage of the aftermath of the -- stating tornado in Moore, Oklahoma. Standing in the midst of it it's almost too much to believe. These homes flattened, barely a wall standing anywhere you look in this devastation. As I said, almost too much to believe. But there are several places around the world that do believe that because they've lived through it before. Joplin, Missouri, the tornado struck there two years ago tomorrow. Some 158 people were killed in that devastating tornado. They know what Moore is going through right now.

Let's bring in Mark Rohr, the city manager for Joplin, Missouri, right now.

Mr. Rohr, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it.

Let me just, first, ask you, what's your message to the people here in Moore, Oklahoma?

MARK ROHR, CITY MANAGER FOR JOPLIN, MISSOURI (voice-over): Well, they're involved in a long process and it's going to take some time to get back any sense of normalcy. And that they have friends out there that are going to help them. They're going to need some assistance from the others in the nearby area throughout the country and throughout the world. And we're ready to respond and help them to whatever degree we can, whatever assistance they need.

BERMAN: You are already have sent assistance a team from Joplin, Missouri, was sent down here to Moore to do whatever they can to help. I have to ask you this, it's been two years now, two years of recovery for you in Joplin, Missouri. Still, what's it like to see these images here in Oklahoma?

ROHR: Well, they're eerily familiar with when we went through here in Joplin. We empathize with the citizens of Moore. We think we understand, to some degree, what they're going through right now based on our experience and like I said, if there's anything we can do at all to help them based on the things that we've been through, we stand prepared to provide that assistance.

BERMAN: What's the most important thing for people here as they pick through pieces of their homes and try to put their lives back together?

ROHR: That there will be a better tomorrow. There is a road to recovery and that things will get better and do not give up hope. There's a lot of people out there that are saying prayers for them and formalizing plans to provide assistance and that assistance will thereby for them and hold on to that hope and realize tomorrow will be a better day. Every day that goes on, things will get better.

BERMAN: Every day that goes on things will get better, Mark Rohr, two years after the disaster there with a message of hope for the people here in Moore, Oklahoma.

Mark Rohr, thank you so much.

CNN's coverage of the devastation here in Moore, Oklahoma, will continue right after this break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome to our viewers in the United States and around the world. I'm Chris Cuomo in Moore, Oklahoma. We are tracking the situation here from a devastating tornado that struck this community at 3:00 p.m. yesterday. We'll give you all details and the latest on casualties and the efforts to recover.