As a lifelong Oklahoman, Alie Stone has seen her share of severe weather and then some.

Alie even worked for the Red Cross as a disaster program specialist for a time. Those experiences encouraged her to make a severe weather action plan in case of emergencies. 

Alie says her experiences and emergency plan were critical to her family’s decision to evacuate their home in Sulphur, Oklahoma, before it was destroyed by a tornado.

“I don’t think staying here would have been as successful. Would we be alive? Yeah, I think we would be alive, but I think there would be a lot of trauma to deal with. My 2-year-old is super confused as to the state of the house and why we won’t let her in,” said Stone.

On April 28, 2024, the Stone family was closely watching a professional weather analyst’s YouTube livestream and their local news. Alie and her husband, Derrick, made the decision to evacuate instead of sheltering in place. They went to their sister’s house outside the city limits with their children, Anthony, 25, and Elle, 2, Their 19-year-old daughter, Macey, also evacuated, going to a different location with her mother.

They left for their secure location early as a precaution, thinking even if nothing came of the weather, everyone at Alie’s sister’s house would be happy to receive a visit. As the storm rolled through Sulphur, the Stones quickly learned the gravity of the situation.

Neighbors and friends started checking in on them to see if they were safe because their house had been destroyed.

When the family could not reenter Sulphur immediately after the storm, a friend volunteering with animal rescue got into their house and pulled their dogs out so they weren’t left alone overnight in the wreckage. The Stones returned the next morning and were able to take stock of their home.

“I think there’s a part of us that gets very complacent, because how many times do we have to run for shelter in the spring or the fall and its one of those things where you can think, ‘OK, we’re leaving the house, we’re going to [take shelter], we’ll come back,’ and sometimes you just don’t have anything to come back to,” Alie said.

Five days after the tornado, Alie had salvaged what could be saved of the family’s belongings or piled it up on their couches to keep it off the floor. The laminate flooring is swollen with stormwater, and with every step it sinks an inch back down to the concrete slab. A Red Cross bag covered in debris rests at the bottom of a closet. A once-cheery orange kitchen with succulents on the windowsill is splattered with mud and debris.

The starkest sign to Alie that the Stones’ decision to leave their home is the roof being mostly gone. The bathroom where they had planned to shelter in place no longer has a ceiling.

“It’s a bit of a shock. But I feel good about it — we had a good plan and we were able to execute a lot of things very quickly, and our community as a whole was able to do that.” 

While Alie said she has a case of “disaster brain” where she forgets some things, she said she and her family are on the mend.

“Elle is really doing fantastic, but she was staring at the house forever and could not—” Alie trailed off, looking at the waterlogged stuffed animals in a canopy of a destroyed bedroom.

“You know, she was like, “What looks wrong with this picture?’”

As a Red Crosser, Alie served others in their times of need. Now, the Red Cross was able help her family in theirs.

“We were here at the house working and they found us. They were one of the organizations that were here almost immediately, already handing out totes and setting up the shelter,” Alie said.

The Stone family received plastic totes, cleaning supplies, water, work gloves and more from the Red Cross. Even though they had secured other temporary housing, Alie stopped by the shelter to learn where to get more plastic totes, get on the list for casework, and get updates on when a local resource center would open.

In addition to creating an emergency plan with help from the Red Cross, Alie was glad she remembered to pack a toothbrush and a change of clothes for her toddler. While they had collected important paper documents, she wishes she would have invested in waterproof bags. She recommends not forgetting to pack non-traditional sentimental items, like some things her mother had made for Christmas, that are now lost.

The Stone family will not rebuild their home on the exact site where it stood, but Alie hopes to remain on the east side of Sulphur. She loves its historic districts. Alie said the April 28 tornado reinforces how important it is for families to prepare for emergencies by getting an emergency kit, making a plan and staying informed.

“It is incredibly important that they do their due diligence and make sure even if there won’t be another storm here for another 50 years, they work through those things.”