This was all very foreseeable.
I don’t want to second guess anyone on this tradegdy but, I was told that they had 15 minutes warning. If you watch the video of the strom approaching the High School and if the Elementry school had the same busses as did the High School, You can see the busses sitting there and the twister aooroaching @ I think they said 2.5 mph! there is no damage as of yet and hi-ways not blocked, those busses should have been loaded and out to anywhere perpendicular of the storm! the Storm was 2 miles wide. Even @ only 10 miles an hour the busses could have been out of harms way and you know the driver would have been doin max! That would have been my option!
You don’t build basements in OK. There is a reason very few houses have them and those are typically from the 50’s and 60’s and were built to be fallout shelters. The soil makes it extremely difficult. The soil is hard and no matter how well you build the basement, it will eventually leak.
The only way to survive that tornado was to be out of its path or below ground. Below ground is not an option for schools. Because of the timing of the storm and the heavy population where it went through, evacuation was not a good option either. It was only about 30 minutes from clear skies to the tornado sirens going off. In OK, once the sirens go off, schools go on lockdown.
There was only a 50% chance of severe weather yesterday that could possibly produce a tornado. If we closed schools every time that was the forecast, they might as well close school down in mid April for the summer. This was a simply a combination of worst case scenarios.