If I lived 5 miles further north or if the F5 tornado came a little south, my house would be in that same situation. Half of the town was wiped off the map. There is a family in our church small group who just finished building a house in New Hartford, just east of Parkersburg, who lost everything. They had just enough time to run down into the basement and to shut themselves into a storage closet. The door banged and they had a hard time holding it shut. By the grace of God they were able to keep it shut. When they opened the door they found themselves on the set to the movie Twister. Their house was completely gone. They opened the door and found themselves outside.That must have been so crazy to experience something like that. Five people did lose their lives and the community is very sad about that. My small group is meeting tonight to discuss what we can do to help our friends out. We are pooling supplies and will offer our friends an array of items. I hope that none of us experience an event like this ever in our life!
9 comments:
It is staggering.
We are all feeling something here in the Cedar Valley. There are so many people helping out it is a shinning moment in humanity.
On a side note to this, we stopped counting after 35 Monday night. We had at least that many ambulence vehicles fly past my house on 1st street. They were taking most of the injured people to Satori here in CF.
Another side note: Our friends told us more last night about their adventure. Mike found their neighbors from across the stree laying outside in theie debris covered yard after the tornado. The guy was already dead and the other still in critical condition. I couldn't even imagine the horror he felt when coming across that scene.
Stay thirsty my friends!
My boss lives about one street over from where we had a tornado touch down in the north metro on Sunday. A bunch of newer development houses were pulled right off the foundations and flung about 50 yards into a pond. Only one death in all the craziness.
On a side note - tou gotta wonder about the quality of some of this new construction in the past 15 years when garages are ripped up and tossed aside and the cars remain, unscathed. Even if they were constructed a little more sturdily, having "great rooms" with all that unecessary vertical frontage on your house, and huge glass sliding doors in your walk-out basement is just not the thing to do in tornado country.
What you really need is an 1195 square foot rathole.
When the rats start flying upwards hang on tight my friend.
Tornadoes, unlike hurricanes strike tiny little areas. In hurricane areas they have storm shutters and the like. And still, houses are destroyed.
Tornadoes are more powerful (in a force per square foot sense) so short of living in a concrete bunker, if a tornado directly hits your house, you're house is toast new construction or not.
I heard a crazy story about parents holding their toddler by the legs while he was being sucked up, a beam from the house fell on the kid, allowing the parents to secure him - amazingly - the child was fine - suffering no injury from the falling beam, which saved his or her life
An F5 - !?!
An F5 is the highest rating for a tornado. It had winds in the excess of over 205 miles per hour.
Better to get hit with F5 than M5.
What is an M5?
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