Oklahoma City, Oklahoma – Yesterday afternoon I spoke to some Oklahoma-based employees of super-regional security company ASG Security. Thankfully, all employees and employee families are safe, according to Bob Ryan and Ralph Masino of ASG Security, but many were witnesses to the destruction that occurred May 20.

All touted ASG Connect, ASG’s interactive home security panel which it OEMs from 2GIG. ASG Security provides the “Severe Weather Alert”  service (powered by Alarm.com) to its Oklahoma customers free of charge, Ryan told me.

Bobby Walker, sales manager in ASG’s Oklahoma City office, lives in Moore. On Monday afternoon, he saw that the storm was bearing down and went to retrieve his son from school, which is located two miles away from the Plaza Towers Elementary School where several children died in the tornado.

“When I got there, they said they were not checking any more students out and we needed to take cover,” Walker said. “I found the room my son was in and we were told to take cover. It was the scariest moment of my life. I was lying on top of my son and it sounded like canon balls were hitting the side of the building. Thuds, huge thuds and [sounds like] a jet engine firing up outside the building.”

The tornado passed in a matter of minutes, but when Walker and his son went outside, “it looked like a bomb dropped, houses were obliterated, every telephone pole was down. It was mass chaos,” he said.

Walker had two more children to retrieve. The road was impassable for cars and Walker’s car was totaled anyway, so he and his son walked the five miles to the school his other children attend.

There was no cell coverage and in neighborhoods along the way, “it was rubble propped up by more rubble.”

(Story by Martha Entwistle/SecuritySystemsNews.com)

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