Gate guards help civilians trapped in tornado’s path

  • Published
  • By Jeanne Grimes
  • Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center Public Affairs
With low-traffic volume, Marauder Gate here is usually a quiet posting for the 72nd Security Forces Squadron, but swing shift May 8 changed all that.

Airman 1st Class Amanda DeBoer and Oklahoma Army National Guard Spec. Theea Stephens were not long into the shift when civilian workers arriving at the gate brought bad news. They told them a tornado had touched down in nearby Moore and was traveling a northeast track of devastation toward the base.

After alerting the command post, DeBoer and Stephens closed the gate and began directing people to the small storm shelter adjacent to the concrete guard house. They shut themselves in with four or five civilians as sirens began to wail both on and off base. Then they heard the knocking.

“There were more people up there,” DeBoer said. “They wanted us to open the gates and let them leave.”

Instead, the two guards ordered everyone into the 10-by-10-foot shelter.

Antonio Burciaga, an aircraft mechanic on base, was particularly insistent. He wanted to go home so he could check on his children.

“I forced him out of his vehicle,” said the petite DeBoer. “We looked up and the tornado was about 200 feet away and I said, ‘OK, it’s coming for us.’”

With scant seconds to spare, they cleared the area and closed the storm cellar’s door. Crowded into the shelter were “nine civilians, two off-duty police officers and us,” DeBoer added.

Below ground, they heard the fury passing overhead.

DeBoer said she heard cracking and stuff hitting the cement.

“I felt water dripping on me,” she said. “We knew there was going to be damage.”

One of the off-duty police officers, peering through a crack, described the maelstrom above and told the group, “Wow, you can look into the eye of a tornado.”

DeBoer, who came to Tinker in January, estimated the storm refugees were in the shelter perhaps half an hour.

“It seemed like an eternity though,” she said.

The airman has weathered more hurricanes in her native Massachusetts than she has fingers and toes to count them, but said taken together “they’re nothing compared to a tornado.”

The winds chewed up nearby trees, rolled vehicles like marbles, stripped the roof from the concrete-block guard shack, ripped cyclone fencing from posts, tore the vent piping from the storm cellar, cracked the shelter’s concrete and downed scores of electrical lines.

DeBoer radioed the security forces desk and reported extensive damage. Then she and Stephens once again took up their posts at the gate.

Stephens, a native Oklahoman from Ada, grew up accepting the state’s “Tornado Alley” designation but never before has she been so close to the chaos cyclonic winds pack.

“It was huge,” she recalled. “Even from a distance, it was pretty wide.”

Burciaga, who works swing shift, had not been on the job long when talk of a tornado prompted him to leave to check on his children who were at home.

The only obstacles in his path were the two gate guards.

“They wouldn’t let me (pass),” he said. “If she [DeBoer] hadn’t stopped me … She more or less saved my life.”

The reluctant mechanic crowded into the shelter with the others when he saw the “big black funnel” bearing down on the gate.

“It hypnotized me,” he recalled. “I remember the guard pulling my arm. What was weird was the way (the tornado) sounded, the way it came. It was the worst roar I ever heard in my life. Then I couldn’t hear nothing for about five seconds, like my eardrums had just been sucked out. The pressure finally let up. I don’t want to hear that noise again. Never.”

Burciaga was scared to leave the shelter, afraid of what he might -- and might not -- find.

“I had a lot of friends who were working 200 feet to the north,” he explained.

The buildings and the workers they house were spared. Not so for Burciaga’s 1994 Dodge Intrepid, which sustained heavy damage. Stuck on base, unable to reach his children by telephone, Burciaga fretted. Eventually, Chaplain (Maj.) Don Bretz drove Burciaga the 15 miles home.

“I’m grateful for those two … security guards,” he said. “I didn’t appreciate them stopping me, but now I do.”

Stephens said 20-20 hindsight like Burciaga’s was widespread among the little group at Marauder Gate.

“Several people were not happy going in [the shelter] … but they were OK coming out,” she explained.