Happyland —  

Weather and emergency management officials determined the storm damage that killed a woman and left a man injured was in fact a microburst.

The weather event destroyed a mobile home and killed 51-year-old Machelle Epperly and seriously injured Ricky Don Epperly, 54.

Both were at home Monday when a microburst hit their double-wide mobile home, causing it to roll over several times and disintegrate. Ricky and Machelle Epperly were trapped under the debris.

Firefighters pulled Ricky Epperly from under a large pile of debris. Machelle Epperly was found a short time later. Ricky Epperly was taken to Valley View Regional Hospital in Ada, then flown to OU Medical Center (OUMC) in Oklahoma City and admitted in critical condition with multiple injuries. A spokesperson for OUMC said Epperly was upgraded to serious condition Tuesday.

Machelle Epperly was taken to Criswell Funeral Home in Ada where funeral arrangements are pending.

• What is a microburst?

According to the National Weather Service, a microburst is a downdraft of air in a thunderstorm that is less than 2.5 miles in size. When the column of air hits the ground, it spreads out, sometimes in one direction, and can destroy whatever lies in its path. The devastation can be as bad or worse than a tornado. What’s more alarming than a tornado is, a microburst has no warning signs.

• The event

The microburst which hit the Epperlys home on County Road 3630 had 100-plus mile-per-hour winds, according to Rick Smith, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service Norman Forecast Office. Smith toured the area with Pontotoc County Emergency Management Director Chad Letellier Tuesday.

“It was pretty intense,” Smith said. “It may have been 100 mile-per-hour winds that hit this mobile home and caused the destruction here. We don’t know for sure, but combining what we saw on radar with what we’ve seen here today, that’s our determination at this point.”

Letellier said Monday he believed it was a microburst, but only had a short time to speculate as the event happened just before dark. Based on his investigation, Smith said it was more than likely a microburst.

“We can never know for sure,” Smith said. “You can come out and look at the damage and you can’t say exactly what’s going on. Even straight-line winds or microbursts are never perfectly in a straight line, so there’re things that swirl around.”

Smith said microbursts are impossible to predict.

“You can’t really see a good signature on radar for (microbursts) and a lot of times you don’t know it’s happened until emergency management or somebody in the community reports it to us, by that time it’s already done,” Smith said.

Smith said microbursts are often confused with tornadoes because the devastation can be as bad.

“A lot of people don’t understand, 100-mile-per hour winds that destroy a mobile home are just as bad as 100-mile-per-hour winds in a tornado,” Smith said. “Wind is wind and when it hits as structure like that the damage is virtually the same.”

• The response

The call originally went out that a tornado had dropped down and two or three people were trapped under a mobile home. Firefighters from Happyland, Ada, Stonewall, Union Valley, Byng, Homer and Allen responded.

“The response went very well,” Letellier said. “Everyone was real coordinated, worked extremely well together. The rescue effort went well, the recovery effort went well and the search, too. They had to search the whole path to see if there were any other victims or damage. The sheriff’ department and some of the other fire units carried that out and they did a good job.”

Letellier said it is now protocol that departments shouldn’t respond to a situation unless they are called.

“I don’t know anybody from our county who self-dispatched last night,” Letellier said. “Everybody waited for a call or, in a couple cases, called me and said, ‘we’re ready if you need anything,’ but they never rolled out of their departments or came to the scene unless they were asked for. It shows the level of training we’ve put in in the last five or six years on that subject.”

Oklahoma Highway Patrol troopers, Allen police and Chickasaw Nation Lighthorse police also responded.