Twenty-five years ago, they met on a highway, took cover under an overpass and survived a deadly tornado.
Most Oklahomans have a tornado story to tell. But Tammy Holmgren and J. Pat Carter have a famous picture to put with theirs. It appeared on front pages of newspapers and TV news programs across the globe that next day.
Like every Oklahoman along the 38-mile path of destruction near Oklahoma City that Monday, no one expected tornado history to be made.
The weather forecast for May 3, 1999, called for partly cloudy skies and breezy winds from the southwest that would blow at 10 to 20 mph.
“Storms will develop on Tuesday,” the weather report said.
Earlier that day, Holmgren and her two children had dropped off her husband, then an Army staff sergeant, at the airport. He was on his way to Korea to serve overseas. Holmgren and her girls, 6-year-old Megan and 2-year-old Kaitlyn, went on to shop. That afternoon they started to head back home to Elgin, Oklahoma, driving along the H.E. Bailey Turnpike outside of Newcastle.
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The voices on the radio mentioned something about storms. Then they started talking about tornadoes. But that didn’t hit Holmgren initially until she looked to her right and saw a funnel on the ground. She could hardly steer to stay in her lane with the wind gusting so furiously.
By the time she stopped near an overpass and got out of her minivan, the wind was so strong that she couldn’t open the passenger doors. Megan and Kaitlyn kept looking at their mom through the window. They could sense the panic.
Megan asked, “Are we going to die?”
“No, God will protect us,” Holmgren told her as she tried over and over to pull the door open.
Moments before and not too far away, Carter kept thinking of the conventional wisdom at the time: If you get close to a tornado while driving, lie flat in a ditch if you can’t seek shelter.
“There was no way I was going to do that,” he remembered.
He had been driving toward the tornadoes for some time, stopping every so often to take photos of it. He was the photographer for the Oklahoma City bureau of The Associated Press, and the bosses in New York kept asking for new shots to put on the wire.
“So I kept going. But I am looking at the funnel over my left shoulder, and I had to do something,” he recounted during a recent interview with the Tulsa World.
Once he got on the turnpike, he kept seeing people hiding under bridges as he drove toward the funnels.
“I went miles past where I shot the photo at,” he said. “I started seeing funnels hitting the ground. I was going the wrong way in the westbound lane. I would drive a while and stop and shoot pictures, then drive and shoot pictures. I felt like I was getting too close. So I saw a bridge and cars parked by it.
“That’s when I saw Tammy.”
He parked and ran up to her, telling her to get under the bridge.
“She looked at me and yelled, ‘I can’t get my kids out of the car,’” Carter said. “I don’t know what happened. Somehow I got the door open. She grabbed a kid, and I grabbed the other. I told her to come on.”
The winds by that point were increasing in miles per hour by the second.
After they got under the overpass, he grabbed his camera and pointed it at the funnel.
“I got three frames of it,” he said. “It was about a hundred yards or more away. Then it came toward us. I thought we weren’t going to make it. But I pushed her and the kids down and got on top of them. I felt one of my pagers hit me before it flew off. I got one of the kids in my arms, and she’s crying. The last thing I told her was, ‘This is bad as it’s going to get.’”
Holmgren remembered looking over at Carter.
“I saw he was holding my baby,” she said. “I had the other. And prayed.”
Once the tornado passed, Holmgren heard Carter saying, “I need to take photos of this.”
“I thought, ‘What kind of crazy person is thinking about taking photos?’” she said, laughing during her recent interview.
Carter then ran back to his car, breaking a basic rule of journalism by not getting the names of the people in his photos.
When he came up to his vehicle, he noticed that the back was covered with chicken feathers.
“I guess there was a farm nearby,” he said.
Carter would work the next 24 hours straight. The number of victims started to multiply. A group of AP’s national reporters flew in to help from Colorado, where they had spent two weeks covering the aftermath of the deadly Columbine school shooting there.
Back then with a digital camera, Carter didn’t know what he had until he plugged it into a computer. Even then, he didn’t know what was captured in those seconds.
Lindel Hutson, the AP bureau chief in Oklahoma City, came out of his office after the photo with the Holmgren family was broadcast and said, “Carter, you didn’t tell me there were two funnels in that picture.”
Carter hadn’t seen the second one, on the left of the big one, before he sent the photo out to the globe.
Days later, Carter and Holmgren met on a national TV morning show. She got to thank him. To this day, he’s not sure how he got that door open.
By the end of the tornado outbreak over two days, 74 tornadoes had touched down across two states in less than 21 hours, according to the National Severe Storms Laboratory.
The strongest tornado was rated at a then maximum F-5 on the Fujita Tornado Scale. It was on the ground for nearly an hour and a half. Forty-six people died. Eight hundred more were injured. More than 8,000 homes were damaged or destroyed.
If you look on the map at the path of that tornado, the overpass where Holmgren and Carter took cover had wind speeds of more than 200 mph.
Carter retired from The Associated Press in 2015 after 19 years. Holmgren said it doesn’t feel like 25 years have passed. She still credits Carter for saving their lives that day.
After more than four decades behind a camera, Carter said he’s not saved many memories about that tornado and what he saw that day.
“I have had to forget about some of it,” Carter admitted. “A lot of the events over my years I had to forget.
“But with Tammy and her kids, it happened too fast. So quickly. I did what I thought was necessary. I hope anyone would have done what I did.”