The patient was in cardiac arrest when the ambulance arrived, and the EMTs had to use a defibrillator to shock his heart back to life.

“It was the first exciting call of the night,” remembers Jimmy Mood, the driver.

As the ambulance rushed toward the hospital last Sunday, the rain was just beginning to freeze against the windshield. The streets were just beginning to grow slick. And the tree branches were just beginning to sag.

“It was a pretty normal night,” Moody says. “We had no idea what was about to happen.”

Nobody did.

One forecast for last Sunday night was “a little rain early, then a bit of ice.”

A bit.

‘Weirdest night’: Somehow, Nathan Mars managed to stay asleep until 4 a.m., when the phone rang. His girlfriend wanted to know if they would have classes Monday at Jenks High School, where Mars is a senior.

“I don’t think so,” he decided, looking out the window.

Mars lives near 101st Street and Yale Avenue, but the scene would’ve looked the same almost anywhere in Tulsa. Trees bent over in the middle. Broken branches littered the rooftops and blocked the roads. Eerie green flashes lit up the sky as the power lines snapped.

Like thousands of other people across Tulsa and northeastern Oklahoma, Mars lay awake the rest of the night, listening to

“It was the weirdest night ever.”

‘A big one’: By the time Mars and his girlfriend hung up the phones, Rod Carter was already on his way to Tulsa from Broken Bow, where he’s an engineer for American Electric Power-Public Service Company of Oklahoma.

About 200 miles south of Tulsa, he was comfortable in a short-sleeve shirt when he left home at 3 a.m. Monday. As he drove, he knew hundreds of other utility workers were already starting to converge on the area, too—some from as far away as Georgia.

“They told me to pack enough clothes for 10 days,” Carter says. “It was going to be a big one.”

‘Started to sink in’: Teil Blackshare had been awake for much of the night, too. But he didn’t realize how serious the damage was until he was driving to work Monday morning at Asbury United Methodist Church, where he’s the managing director of ministries.

“I knew my own neighborhood was a war zone, but I didn’t know everybody else’s neighborhood was the same,” Blackshare says. “It started to sink in just how bad it was.”

Nearly a quarter of a million homes and businesses sat in the dark across the Tulsa area, with hundreds of thousands of people left without heat. By lunchtime Monday, Blackshare had a team of volunteers collecting supplies. By 3 p.m., Asbury had opened its doors as a Red Cross shelter. And by nightfall, dozens of people were sleeping on the gymnasium floor and spilling into Sunday school classrooms.

‘One after the other’: Tree branches continued to fall through the night Monday and well into Tuesday, reblocking streets that had already been cleared more than once. Neighborhoods became obstacle courses.

“We’d have to stop, turn around and circle back,” says Mood, the ambulance driver. Occasionally, fire crews literally had to saw their way through debris.

By Tuesday afternoon, the 911 calls still hadn’t slowed down, but the type of emergency was changing. In the immediate aftermath of the ice storm, Mood and the other EMTs were scrambling between car accidents and chain saw mishaps.

Now they began to see asphyxiations from gas heaters, stovetop burners and gasoline- powered generators.

Back-up batteries were running down on breathing machines and kidney dialysis equipment.

“It was all just a blur,” Mood says. “We’d drop one patient off at the hospital and already have another call—one after the other, no pause in between.”

‘The worst part’: By midweek, the stress was obviously getting to people, making nerves as brittle as tree limbs. Famous for their good manners on the road, Oklahomans started blaring their car horns like New Yorkers.

“My husband and me are snapping at each other,” reports Daniella Dulles. The first couple of nights, huddled under blankets and playing cards by candlelight on the floor of their living room, Dulles almost had fun.

“It got old fast.”

By the third night, with not a single light to be seen in their north Tulsa neighborhood, she was packing a suitcase to stay with relatives in Dallas.

“I’m going to give it a couple more days because I can’t miss work,” she says. With trees down in the yard and the electrical box ripped off the house, Dulles and thousands of other Tulsans face expensive repairs.

“The worst part is how to pay for all this.”

‘So tired’: In such a darkened city, even the most subtle light bulbs stood out like flashing neon. The glimpse of a living room lamp could spark jealousy. Christmas decorations seemed like taunts.

And porch lights became beacons, guiding friends and relatives to warm, safe havens.

By late in the week, extralong extension cords began to crisscross neighborhoods, stretching across streets and alleys to share what little electricity there was.

One of the lucky few who never lost power in east Tulsa’s Sungate area, Laura Simms opened her own kind of emergency shelter. More than 20 friends, relatives and neighbors moved in, filling the house with blankets and bedrolls, turning every room — even the formal dining area — into makeshift barracks.

Feeding them became a fulltime job for Simms.

“Nobody’s stepping on any toes. Everybody seems really thankful, so I can’t say it’s a burden.”

During daylight hours, Simms’ son — the quarterback of Memorial High School’s football team — got several other players together and roamed the neighborhood to clear debris from the streets and yards.

“We work all day,” Tyler Simms says. “So when we get home, we’re so tired we go straight to sleep.”

‘Pulling together’: Mars had been right about what he told his girlfriend on the night of the ice storm — school was out. But running his own lawncare business at the age of 18, Mars stayed busy from sun up to sun down clearing debris and trimming branches. Every few hours, he’d put down the chain saw and go back home to check on an 80- something-year-old neighbor, whose husband died just a few weeks ago.

“She’s kind of small and fragile,” Mars says. Using some of the cash he earned cutting trees, he bought a generator and hooked it up to give the widow some lights and a little heat.

“It wasn’t a big deal,” Mars shrugs, suggesting that thousands upon thousands of Oklahomans have offered kind gestures to each other in the last few days. “I think everybody’s pulling together and doing what they can.”

‘People are dancing’: A convoy of more than 200 utility trucks rumbled into Broken Arrow, with the police blocking all the intersections for several miles Thursday afternoon while inconvenienced drivers climbed out of their cars — not to curse, but to cheer and clap.

“It was a sight to see,” says Carter, the AEP-PSO engineer from Broken Bow. “It was like an army coming to liberate the town.”

Crews worked from first light to 9 or 10 o’clock at night, grabbing a snack to eat whenever and wherever they could. By noon Friday, Carter was standing under a light pole near the Broken Arrow Justice Center, where another crewman climbed into a cherry picker to reach three giant breaker-switches. With the flash of a blue-green spark, another 250 homes got their power back.

“People are dancing in their living rooms right now,” Carter smiles. Back at Expo Square, officials announce that the number of customers without power has dropped below 100,000.

‘Don’t know’: After a couple of days off to take care of the damage at his own house, Mood climbed back behind the wheel of an ambulance Saturday afternoon — just in time for a snowstorm.

After one of the most stressful and expensive weeks in Tulsa history, Mood and the rest of the city are bracing for whatever comes next. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Mood says. Nobody does.

Michael Overall 581-8383
michael.overall@tulsaworld.com