Date: April 16th Setting: My living room.
I come from a small Italian family, which yes I have been informed is a total oxymoron. It’s just me, Jeff (Dad), and Debra (Mom). We include our dog as part of the family as well, but not so much the cat. She’s hidden under a bed for the vast majority of the time anyway. So we’re kind of a family of 4 and a half.
On April 16th, just before 4 in the afternoon, my family and I (minus the cat), sat lounging and enjoying the rainy day. It was my first day of spring break, and I’d been out late at a party the night before. I was on my laptop, writing of course. Jeff had the weather channel on as white noise. Debra sat with her iPhone, browsing Facebook. This is pretty typical for my family. At any one moment at least one of us is using an Apple product.
The wind outside was insane, and the rain hit the windowpanes with such force it made me think of medieval times when invading armies would attempt to siege a palace by means of a battering ram. I fervently hoped this outer opposition would not succeed and invade my home with bombardments of watery droplets. The weather channel was having a field day with the immense number of tornado watches and warnings.
Debra stood up, gaping at her iPhone and shouted to the rest of us that a neighbor had just updated her status, reporting a tornado coming straight towards us.
That’s right. Facebook saved my life. I ought to send a fruit basket to Mark Zuckerberg.
So here’s the ranking for levels of panic in my home. First place, hands down, is my mother. I’m a close second. As for Jeff, I doubt he even knows the meaning of the word ‘panic.’
Debra shepherded all of us to the center of the house, as far away as possible from the ten-foot high windows. She and I took refuge in the bathroom, one of the few quarters in our house without windows.
Side note: We live in a 200 year-old cotton mill. Complete with 100-foot tall smokestack. Anyway, there are two tracks of thought going at this point. One is the half full approach: Meh, some tornado that’s probably not going to come has nothing on this place. 200 years versus 200 mph of speeding winds, no biggie. Then there’s the half empty, which I would post here, but I feel as if that would be a very bad thing for children to stumble upon. I hate to ruin innocence. For the most part it involved images of a falling smokestack.
Side note over. Debra and I sat on the floor of the cramped bathroom, Macs splayed across our laps. Jeff, meanwhile, sought shelter in the pantry to do laundry. This was so not the right moment to be the ideal husband.
The lights crackled, and then flickered out in perfect harmony. Debra screamed for my dad. Jeff let out an expletive and dashed across the hallway.
Sitting in complete and utter darkness, the door flashed open to let Jeff in, and through the hallway I could see close to nothing. The windows were enveloped by a smoky gray that seemed almost as pitch as the bathroom now with its door returned to its former closed position.
I had always heard that tornadoes sound like a train coming. Not so for me. It sounded more like a thousand nuts and bolts locked in a washing machine running on high. It’s a terrible grating, whirring, powerful noise.
The pressure was immense, and I could feel it on all sides. My breath came out ragged, and the weight from the air pressed against my ears to the point they ached and I cried out in pain. The walls shuddered and groaned in protest to the onslaught of twisting gusts. Bits of ceiling plaster fluttered down onto our heads like harmless snow, so benign in comparison to the violent events which caused them.
Then, as sudden as it had begun, it stopped. I let out a deep breath, one that I hadn’t even known I’d been holding in. How was I to know we were directly in the eye?
It started all over again, the walls shaking, the floor rumbling beneath my feet, the awful noise, and the immense pain that threatened to split my head in two.
It was all over then, no fake-outs this time. I opened my laptop once more to check the weather; it reported another tornado coming in 4 minutes.
Then the knocking started on both doors. I ran to the front, Debra to the back, Jeff upstairs to survey the damage. I ran, struggled with the locks even more than usual, and swung open the door, afraid of what I might see. I couldn’t even look past the slender figure in front of me to process the damage left behind. It was my neighbor Roess, 13.
“I’m home alone,” she sobbed to me. “I don’t know where my Mom is!”
Roess was by herself when the tornado hit, and she had to go through the entire experience I was able to go through with my family as support, and she had not even knowledge of if the person who gave birth to her was alive. She hid in a closet downstairs with only a flashlight for company. I couldn’t even imagine. And then she ran down to my house, not knowing if another tornado would sneak up behind as she sought shelter and comfort.
From behind I could hear one of my neighbors demanding a sledgehammer; someone was trapped in a unit and couldn’t get out.
Jeff came down, reporting that my ceiling was missing, and that puddles of water had begun to saturate everything in my bedroom.
Debra relayed this information to another neighbor at the back door, who shouted back that the main building had it much worse. A roof had been ripped off, busting the main sprinkler pipe, gushing thousands of gallons of water, knee deep, into the main building.
I took Roess into our bathroom, and we hid in the tub, preparing for the next onslaught, towels above our heads to protect us from falling ceiling pieces. I recall repeatedly kissing her knee like I used to when we were much younger and telling her that everything would be fine. My shaking voice betrayed the calm facade I was putting on to reassure her.
I checked my phone, I had a message from my neighbor Mark; he’d sent it just before the twister.
Mark: Hey, how’s the storm over at the mill?
Me: Hey, where are you? We just went though a tornado.
Mark: Cup a Joe. Are you serious? How are things?
He called to report he was on his way home immediately (despite my protests he’d be safer there).
Then I called my boyfriend of the time. He was completely freaked out of course, and insisted on coming right away to help out. He began immediately cleaning his home to make room for my family to stay while the mill went under reconstruction. I still owe him the world for that, and he’ll never understand how much it really meant to me.
Reports from neighbors unveiled that the rest of the mill residents were hiding underground in our storage basement to escape the next tornado.
At that moment, Roess’s mother, Diane, burst through the door screaming and crying. She had left her car, wide open on the main road, unable to pass through the gates blocked by fallen trees, and ran to her house. Roess wasn’t there of course, and Diane had begun to think the worst. Sopping wet, she clung to her daughter, and together we all ran to the basement.
It was practically a big party down there, despite the constant annoyance of the intolerable fire alarm, plus the fact we were all pretty scared we’d die. Eventually the update reached us that, at least for the moment, we were in the clear. I stepped out into a dazzling green tinted light.
This was the first look I’d really had at what happened.
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| Taken by the Incredible Sam Bennett |
I cried. I cried for the loss of the materials. I cried for the loss of my things. I cried for everyone in surrounding neighborhoods that didn’t have a house as well equipped to withstand the damage as our own. I cried for it all.
I ran to my room to salvage as much as I could as soon as I’d recovered. The first thing I grabbed was my great-grandfather’s collection of currency from World War Two. Then I heard Debra below: “Summer, get out of your room now! The H-VAC unit’s about to fall in!”
Those are words you really don’t want to hear when you know the H-VAC in question is right above your room.
I rushed down to join the throngs of neighbors below, all staring up at my 45 degree angled unit. For the record, it didn’t fall. But you can bet I was not comfortable spending more than five minutes in my room after that moment.
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| Sam Bennett |
This wasn’t how spring break was supposed to go.
We were asked to go back to our units and gather anything we needed, for an indefinite amount of time. We were being evacuated.
I packed and cried. I lived in 3 different homes over the weeklong spring break.
We’re back again. For now. My ceiling is still half ripped off, but there’s a temporary roof over the whole building. My wall is down, including all the insulation, and it will be years until everything is even close to back to normal.
But the tornado wasn’t all bad. It brought the mill even closer together. There’s a sense of camaraderie that lingers after such a disastrous event that makes you look at the ones you didn’t know too well, know that they survived the same as you, and feel a connection to them. It makes you realize how you’re all in this together. No one came out unscathed (either mentally or physically), and we all know we couldn’t make it through without the support of each other. We’re working together to build back the things we lost. But everyone’s still there. No one was seriously injured. We’re all okay in the end.
Then I realized; homes are replaceable. People aren’t. And that's what really matters.
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| Before |
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| After- Sam Bennett |
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