Oklahoma begins recovery in tornado aftermath

At the Moore Walmart, splattered in mud 40ft high and 400ft long, store manager John Sanders was preparing to reopen – 20 hours after customers survived the storm by cowering in the freezer section.

Mr Sanders showed mobile phone photos of the twister leering above the Dollar General shop across the street.

The deeper you walk back from the main drag into the residential areas, the greater the carnage. Single-storey homes near South Telephone Road are mud-caked but mostly escaped severe damage. A few yards back and Heather Lane is wrecked.

"I've never seen anything like this before. It looks like a war zone to me," said Paul Yzaguirre yesterday, wondering how he could move his disabled mother-in-law from her nearby house to better conditions.

Terry Mullins and his son Brian were recovering what they could from the house where Brian's girlfriend, Sara Robinson, lives – lived – with her sister and a roommate. Sara was sheltering in a local library when the twister hit.

The house was bought and completely remodelled only a year ago, said Sara’s father, Mark. Now it is a flayed skeleton. Upstairs, wooden beams jut out like the ribcage of an emaciated corpse, indicating the outline of a structure that used to be the roof.

A short walk away is – was – Plaza Towers elementary school, centre of this disaster, where many children died. “You take your kids to school in the morning, you think you’re going to pick them up in the afternoon,” said Mr Mullins. “If you see it coming and you’re stupid enough to stay there, that’s on you. But those kids didn’t have a chance.”

His house, two miles west, is fine. "It almost got us in 1999, '97 and '03. If you live in Oklahoma it's just natural . . . something you've got to put up with."

He made stoicism sound routine. “You’ve just got to be strong. Build and start all over, that’s all you can do,” he said.

Back on Telephone Road, busy with media, police and residents who have negotiated their way past the police roadblocks, there was once a bowling alley. Amid its tangled guts is the remnants of a lane.

A purple ball at the top of a return machine waits to be picked up. One pin is somehow still standing, though in all other respects the tornado scored a perfect strike. – (Guardian service )