MOORE, Okla. — At the end of the day on Monday, on the last week of the school year, students at Plaza Towers Elementary in this blue-collar suburb were zipping their backpacks. A fifth-grade class had just finished watching a movie about a boy who survives a crash-landing in the Canadian wilderness. 
 
 Then the sirens started to wail. 
 
 Claire Gossett’s teacher hurried the class into the hallway, then into a bathroom as a tornado that was more than a mile wide drew closer. Claire, 11, crammed into a stall with six other girls. They held onto each other. The sirens wailed two, three, four times. 
 
 Echo Mackey, crouched in a hallway with her son, Logan, recalled, “I heard someone say, ‘It’s about to hit us,’ and then the power went out.” 
 
 The mountain of rubble that was once Plaza Towers Elementary School has become the emotional and physical focal point of one of the most destructive tornadoes to strike Oklahoma. Although the casualty toll fluctuated wildly early on, officials said on Tuesday that at least 24 people had died, including 9 children, 7 of them at Plaza Towers. 
 
 Throughout the 500-student school, teachers and parents had shielded students and crammed into closets and anywhere else they could squeeze as the tornado bore down. Then school windows were smashed and the ceiling ripped away, showering the students with glass, wood and pieces of insulation. “I couldn’t hear anything but people screaming and crying,” Claire said. “It felt like the school was just flying.” 
 
 The tornado swirled out of a fast-developing storm that began cutting a destructive path through Moore and other sections of the southern Oklahoma City suburbs on Monday about 2:45 p.m. It plowed through 17 miles of ground over 50 minutes, damaging or destroying hundreds of homes, businesses, schools and hospitals in Moore and in Oklahoma City itself. Winds reached speeds of up to 210 miles per hour, and many structures were wiped clean to their foundations. 
 
 Severe weather has become an almost routine part of life in Oklahoma City and its suburbs, a section of Middle America where the lore of twisters and thunderstorms has long been embraced and at times even celebrated. The National Basketball Association team is called the Thunder, and there is an annual National Weather Festival, where families gather for weather balloon launchings and storm-chaser car shows. But the 1.3-mile-wide tornado that struck Plaza Towers on Monday stunned Oklahomans, in both its size and the number of victims, dozens of whom were students who were killed or injured. 
 
 At a news conference on Tuesday in the lobby of Moore City Hall, which was running on generators because of a widespread power failure, Gov. Mary Fallin said she took an aerial tour of the tornado’s path and inspected the damage by car and on foot. She said she was left speechless. “There’s just sticks and bricks, basically,” she said, adding, “It was very surreal coming upon the school because there was no school. There was just debris.” 
 
 Officials said it was still too early to say precisely how many people had been killed, but the toll appeared to be significantly less than initially feared. State officials lowered the death toll to at least 24, down from their estimate late Monday night of nearly 100 fatalities. One reason for the uncertainty was that officials believed that some bodies might have been taken to local funeral homes instead of the state medical examiner’s office, which was doing the official count. But it appeared that the 48 people who were believed to be missing on Monday night — and were feared dead — had been found. More than 200 were injured, including 70 children. 
 
 The confusion only added to the unease. As officials spoke at City Hall, heavy rain and booms of thunder could be heard, severe weather that had periodically delayed rescuers and those assessing the damage throughout the day. ||||| Adrees Latif / Reuters Taylor Tennyson sits in the front yard as family members salvage the remains of their home, devastated by the Moore tornado. 
 
 The tornado that roared through the Oklahoma City suburbs earlier this week damaged or destroyed as many as 13,000 homes and did as much as $2 billion in damage, authorities said Wednesday. 
 
 The figures underscored the colossal task facing emergency crews as they shifted their focus, two days after the storm, from looking for trapped victims to tackling the mountain of wreckage and helping displaced families. 
 
 Authorities said six people, all adults, remained unaccounted for, but they said those people may simply have walked away from the storm and were not necessarily buried in the rubble. 
 
 “We’re transitioning into recovery,” said Albert Ashwood, the state emergency management director. “I’d be the last one to say that it’s totally over.” 
 
 The tornado killed 24 people and injured more than 200. 
 
 The $2 billion damage figure was given by Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett and matched a preliminary estimate given by Oklahoma insurance officials to The Associated Press. 
 
 That would make the tornado, which ravaged the city of Moore and parts of Oklahoma City, one of the most expensive in American history. The tornado that all but wiped Joplin, Mo., off the map two years ago did $2.8 billion in damage. 
 
 Slideshow: Tornadoes ravage Plains Tannen Maury / EPA A monster tornado hit Moore, Okla., Monday afternoon, leaving at least 24 dead. Launch slideshow 
 
 Authorities in Oklahoma announced late Wednesday that they had identified all of the bodies, and they said that the youngest victims were infants, 4 and 7 months old. They said 10 of the 24 dead were children, up from an earlier figure of nine. 
 
 Heartbreaking portraits of the dead began to emerge. Among them were a third-grader remembered for her ever-present smile and a 65-year-old man separated from his wife when the tornado struck. 
 
 Federal relief workers set out trying to reach families displaced by the storm but said they faced challenges: Cellphones were not working in some places, and other people were focused on salvaging their belongings before they registered for help. 
 
 A White House official said Wednesday afternoon that 1,500 people had registered for federal help through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Administrator Craig Fugate said teams were going through neighborhoods looking for more. 
 
 “Right now it’s about getting people a place to stay who have lost their homes,” he said on “Morning Joe.” “We want to make sure they are getting the help they need.” 
 
 A tour given to NBC’s TODAY of Plaza Towers Elementary School, where seven children were killed, revealed forgotten everyday fixtures of grade school — a basketball covered by splinters of wood, a tattered map of the United States, a textbook about the volcano destruction at the ancient Italian city of Pompeii. 
 
 As cleanup crews faced acre after acre of wrecked homes, the federal government announced it would pick up 85 percent of the tab for debris removal for the first month, and 80 percent for the two months after that. President Barack Obama announced plans to visit Oklahoma on Sunday. 
 
 Authorities faced questions at a press conference about why more people did not have “safe rooms” in their homes to protect them from tornadoes. Officials in Moore had complained about red tape in trying to secure federal grants to build the rooms. 
 
 Gov. Mary Fallin said the state would open a donation fund to help pay for “safe rooms” for people who want them in their homes. But authorities brushed off questions about whether the state could have been better prepared. 
 
 “It’s the anomaly of severe weather,” Ashwood said, referring to the strength of the tornado, which was classified Tuesday as a Category EF5, meaning it had packed winds higher than 200 mph. 
 
 “This is the anomaly that flattens everything to the ground,” he said. “I think everything was done that could be done at the time.” 
 
 Meanwhile, the people of Moore planned to keep combing through the ruins and salvaging what they could. 
 
 On Tuesday, David Kirsch clutched a recovered American flag and said: “This represents the hope that we can be better off. Because where else in the world could you walk away from this and get back up on your feet?” 
 
 Reuters contributed to this report. 
 
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– Nine people are dead and dozens injured after a new round of tornadoes slammed Oklahoma last night, reports AP and CNN. Among the fatalities were a mother and infant, whose bodies were found near their car on I-40, a major state artery. Oklahoma City and its suburbs took the brunt of storms, which were followed by heavy flooding. Fuller assessments will become clearer this morning, but the tornadoes were not as powerful as the EF5 monster that hit Moore, Okla., less than two weeks ago. That city got hit again yesterday, however, with winds estimated at 80mph. "This storm had everything you could handle at one time: tornadoes, hail, lightning, heavy rain, people clogging the highways," says a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Norman, Okla.