Tornadoes: 'the Gamble of Living in Oklahoma'

There aren't too many Oklahomans in Collingswood, but chances are that many of you have seen or heard from musician Dave Kelly.

He's a mainstay of the Farmer's Market, the soft-spoken guitarist with a repertoire of blues, folk and country music.

And he's probably one of the only people in the area who knows first-hand what it's like to live through a tornado.

Kelly doesn't have any close connection to people who were affected by the storm that struck Moore, OK on Monday afternoon, killing 24 people, according to CNN.

But he is more than passingly familiar with the scale of the devastation that such a storm can wreak.

Kelly's own hometown, Tulsa, was fabled to have been magically protected from tornadoes, "because the Creek Indians, that’s where they ended the Trail of Tears," he said.

Sadly, he said, such superstitions were undone for him in 1974, when a storm scattered the second floor of their home throughout the neighborhood.

Kelly was just a child at the time, he recalls, and the family had been out of town for a wedding.

"We came back to no home, basically, and I was looking around going, 'Where are all my toys?'" he recalled.

"We weren’t there to live through it when it hit, so we were fortunate, I guess."

"It's the gamble of living in Oklahoma."

Prairie storms are something between a curiosity and a catastrophe in the midwest, Kelly said. Families and schools have preparedness plans; he can recall practicing tornado drills along with fire drills in school.

But there is something beautiful about seeing the clouds form that will make people "sit out in their backyards and watch until they’re getting too close," he said.

"I think people feel like they’re usually almost ready for them; then you have something like what happened this week, and it’s incredibly devastating and sad," Kelly said.

He recalled traveling along the highway in 1999 during an F5 tornado that boasted 300-mph winds, "and I saw the whole thing come together.

"It’s sunlight, and then you see this dark, ominous cloud, and you can see the wind start churning, and it forms into a full-blown tornado," Kelly said.

"We had the radio on, listening, and we had a pretty good idea where we were in proximity [to the cloud]. But at one point it took up the entire sky," he said.

"Then we started driving like 90 miles an hour, but watching it the whole time in the rearview mirror."

That same group of storms pummelled the city of Stroud, OK, which was basically a rural re-supply depot centered on a 53-store outlet center.

After the storms hit, Kelly said, "the entire thing was gone.

"It’d be like the Cherry Hill Mall was just suddenly taken away," he said. "They didn’t even rebuild it because it was going to be too expensive. Now you’re going to have a town that the entire revenue was based on this strip mall, keeping this town alive."

Oklahomans are resilient, however, Kelly said, and the Sooner State is home to a culture of "nice folks" that "seem to pull together," he said.

Even after the tragedy that was the Oklahoma City bombing, he said, "people pulled together and really helped out."

For more information about how you can support relief efforts in Moore, OK, read "How to Help Victims of the Oklahoma Tornado."