As tornado victims return, the finger-pointing begins Devastation: Three days after the tornado David Estep sits atop a pile of rubble that was the home he shared with his parents. Those without storm shelters had little to fall back on but bathtubs, closets, prayer and a native resilience that at times in the days after the tornado seemed simply confounding. Despite that courage, now that the town is burying its dead and removing the wreckage of homes for the third time since 1999, some are beginning to ask if they should have been better prepared, and whether climate change might have something to do with the violence of their weather. Amber Kriesel, 39, was at home with her husband and their three girls, twins aged four and a six-year-old, when a storm cell a few kilometres away was dragged to the ground by the weight of its own rain, giving birth to a savage tornado. By the time it hit her neighbourhood it was spinning at more than 300km/h and smashing a path more than a kilometre wide through the suburbs. Kriesel and her husband bundled the girls into the bath and packed pillows around them. They put bicycle helmets on their own heads, knelt before the tub and bent over the children to prevent them spinning away in the wind. This was not an unreasonable fear. The Kriesels' home was not so much destroyed around them, as removed. The roof and walls - external and internal - spun away as they hugged their girls. When Fairfax visited, Kriesel pointed out the only remaining fixtures in the home, a toilet and the bathtub that saved them, now anchored to naked concrete. I rode out the 1999 one in a closet. I don't want to go through it again. It looks as though they are getting worse," she said. A block away 45-year-old Rosanna Smith huddled under her staircase cuddling her shi-tzu, Zoe, when the storm hit. She could tell the house was being torn about around her by the way the light changed through the cracks around the door. "I just prayed that if I flew away God would catch me," she said. Finally, just as the staircase was peeling away, the twister moved on, leaving her and Zoe uninjured in the ruins. Smith will rebuild elsewhere. "The first one missed me by a mile, the second one by half a mile," she said of the lethal tornados of 1999 and 2003. This one nailed me. Others were not so lucky. One survivor told of telling her husband she loved him as he was sucked from her arms into the vortex. Laurinda Vargyas, 30, also took shelter in a bath with two children. She told The Oklahoman of being thrown about by the tornado and when she landed, four-year-old Karrina and seven-month-old Sydnee were gone. Sydnee was later found dead in the driveway, Karina in the rubble of a neighbour's house. Experts have no idea why three such unusually destructive tornados have travelled such a narrow path over Moore, though it has been long understood what makes the broader region so susceptible. Oklahoma lies in the middle of twister ally, stretching from the Gulf coast through the midwest and on into Canada. The storms are caused by warm, moist air being channelled from the Gulf of Mexico across the US landmass between the Rocky Mountains to the west and the Appalachians to the east. In spring it collides with cold, dry air heading south from Canada, causing conditions so perfect for tornados that twister alley suffers more than the rest of the world put together. Though Smith remembers sheltering in the closet from time to time as she grew up, she believes they are getting worse. It is an intuition shared by many others. On Monday the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse made a partisan speech blaming Republicans for failing to act over climate change. "So, you may have a question for me," Whitehouse said. Why do you care? Why do you, Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, care if we Republicans run off the climate cliff like a bunch of proverbial lemmings and disgrace ourselves? I'll tell you why. We're stuck in this together. We are stuck in this together. When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. Whatever political point he was seeking to make, Whitehouse's scientific point is hard to defend, so far. Harold Brooks of the National Weather Centre in Norman, Oklahoma, is no climate change sceptic, but he says there is not yet enough evidence to prove the warming planet is causing more - or more violent - tornados. It seems clear rising temperatures are creating more atmospheric energy for the creation of storms. But another key ingredient for American tornados is the "wind shear" caused by the currents from the equator meeting those from the Arctic. As the Arctic warms, it could be that those winds have slowed. The US experienced its second-deadliest tornado season in 2011, when almost 1700 tornadoes killed 553 people. When the Associated Press asked Brooks what this meant, the best answer he could give was, "We've had a dramatic increase in the variability of tornado occurrence." Most Oklahomans seemed unwilling to discuss the possible impact of climate change, perhaps because the topic has been so politicised, perhaps because they have more immediate problems. But by the time the funerals began on Thursday, people were beginning to call for more storm shelters, particularly in schools. Because of the speed and unpredictable nature of tornados, shelters have to be close by to be of any use. Domestic shelters are typically most effective when buried in a garage, so people are not injured by debris as they run for shelter. Such shelters cost about $3000, though a federal rebate is available. Only about one in 10 homes has one. Even the debate over storm shelters has been drawn into the vicious partisanship that marks contemporary American politics. "This is a red state," said one Democratic state representative, Richard Morrissette, who has introduced several failed bills to require safe rooms be built into new homes. People don't like anything that is mandated. They don't like it when the government says they have to do something. He has a new ally in Moore's mayor, Glenn Lewis, who is calling for a local ordinance mandating domestic shelters. With no shelter available to them, teachers at Briarwood Elementary herded students into their well-rehearsed safe positions against walls, in bathrooms and in closets as the storm approached. In one room two teachers bundled their students under desks against the wall, then stretched out their arms and sought to cover the gaps with their own bodies. They sang Row, Row, Row Your Boat as the howling approached, and then God Bless America, which the class had been rehearsing in the lead-up to Memorial Day. In a recording made as one classroom began to disintegrate, teachers can be heard reassuring screaming children: "We're OK, we're OK, we're OK." All those at Briarwood were dug out of the rubble alive, though one teacher told how each breath she took under the rubble became harder and harder to take. It seems likely this is how it was for the seven children who died of asphyxiation in the wreckage of Plaza Towers Elementary. Just as some parents of those killed in December's school massacre at Sandy Hook have campaigned for gun control, some from Plaza Towers are now calling for storm shelters.