The geography of NE Oklahoma is pretty interesting. North and Northwest took you into hills - some steep, none very high, but a terrifically interesting drive into Indian Territory. South, along the Arkansas River was much the same. Oklahoma City to the SW was pretty much a straight shot of level land - big sky stuff. NE, as the crow flew, was Joplin, Missouri now pretty much destroyed.
We were a 50,000 watt station - although FM - and at night, in the absolutely crystal still nights of summer - we carried like a bass drum. On the hour, during that time when we were playing those tapes, I would give the call letters of the station "This is KCMA, Tulsa's classical music station broadcasting from Owasso, OK with a transmitter in ...I forget....at 106FM. The time at the tone is now 4AM Central Standard Time".
This monster tornado that wiped Joplin off the map perhaps forever or at least the rest of my lifetime looped down from the Northwest and took one of those hard right turns that the Weather Channel harps on and formed the super cell of the ages and simply dipped down without a lot of warning and sucked Joplin off the map. A vacuum cleaner that came out of an infomercial and pivoted on a dime and simply sucked up a city and emptied the bag 50 miles away.
All that stuff is headed NE..further down the line and this endless line of storms just marches on. When we on the coast of the Atlantic get a tropical storm or a summer N'or Easter, we smell the tropics in the storm...it is the smell of Florida or a brush over Hatteras...but we can smell it
Who smells Joplin today..those further along. Who does that. Who gets the "heads up" in the spring wind?