Sunday, May 29, 2011

May 24th Tornado

It was a beautiful Oklahoma day.  It was the first day of summer vacation.  We were enjoying our freedom from school and just being lazy.  The television was on satellite channel.  My husband was in Chicago on a business trip.  The phone started ringing.  My husband was getting phone calls and texts from friends that were worried about us.  Before we knew what was happening, sirens were going off and the police were going door-to-door telling people to go below ground and to take cover.  We don't have a cellar, so I placed the kids in the master bedroom closet with pillows and quilts.  Within 15 minutes the electricity was off, and the sky darkened.  Then a whistling sound started.  My 17 year old son threw himself over my 8 year old daughter.  She had on her bicycle helmet and rain boots.  I threw myself onto my son.  As we were huddled together in a pile, we heard the roof lifting off the house and dropping back down.  You could hear the trees hitting the house and the shingles flying off.  The roof sounded like a deck of cards being shuffled.  The wind sounded like a train whistle.  As the wind died down, the limbs continued to hit the house.  After ten or fifteen minutes of deadly silence, I slowly opened the door and crawled out of the closet.  I made my way across the floor to the closest window.

As I opened the blinds, I was unprepared for what I would see.  We live on an acreage that is covered with trees.  That is the only reason we were interesting in purchasing it was because it made us feel like we had our own little farm.  Trees were uprooted, missing tops, broken in half, and generally destroyed.  As my teenager and I left my daughter and went outside to inspect the damage, we were met with total destruction.  My roof was missing in places.  Trees that were four feet around were pulled out of the ground and laying on the fence.  A two inch drilling pipe fence was bent into "v's" in five places.  My chainlink fence was bent at the ground lying on its side.

My son went to the road to check on neighbors.  Jerry, our neighbor across the street, was missing.  We quickly formed a search party.  Another neighbor remembered that our neighbor, Mike, had a cellar.  We started looking for it.  As Dennis walked across the yard, he climbed onto a pile of tree limbs to look around.  He heard screams and pounding and realized that he was standing on top of two trees that had fallen on top of the cellar door.  I yelled for my son to help.  He deadlifts over 500 lbs in competitions.  He couldn't even move those trees.  He went running for a tractor.  He heard a backhoe coming down the road clearing trees.  He waved the man down and had him pull the trees off the door.  One by one my neighbors crawled out.  They had survived a tornado and being buried alive.  There were nine people, six dogs, and a cat in that cellar.  Right before climbing in, my neighbor, Terri, had called my cell phone to find out if we were home.  The call did not go through.  God wanted my family to be out of that cellar so that we could look for her family.

God was watching out for my family.  He had His hand on us in that closet.  I have thanked Him several times for sparing my children.  Unfortunately there were parents in Oklahoma that day that lost their children.  I was a lucky mother.

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