Stories from the April 16, 1998 Tornado

My husband Jeff had spent the entire morning of April 16th with a rented sump pump, draining our flooded basement after a torrential rain the night before. I'd been watching tornado alerts on TV the whole afternoon, so when he told me he was going to return the pump, I said jokingly, "I'm going with you - if we get hit by a tornado, I want us to be together!"

We were driving back down Ellington Parkway at about 3:10 pm, and noticed a bunch of cars parked under an overpass. Then a tractor- trailer that had just entered the parkway from Trinity Lane took the very next exit at Douglas. Our radio had been stolen the week before (while the car was parked in front of our house), so we didn't know about the big funnel heading across the city. But we followed the truck off the parkway, and as we stopped at the end of the ramp, we look up and saw the entire sky rotating clockwise.

Jeff and I were on Gallatin Road. We had just crossed the intersection at Eastland and were about to turn on Stratton when we felt a giant WHOOMP of air blast the car. We saw debris and trees flying over our neighborhood, and as we turned on Stratton, a huge tree had already fallen and blocked the street. We turned around and tried several other blocks - Calvin, Ordway, Forrest - with no luck. All were covered with trees and power lines.

We left the car on Ordway and walked toward our house at 17th & McEwen. All along the way we had to climb over trees and cut through yards. It was a war zone, and I was nearly hysterical. The whole time, Jeff was trying to prepare me for the worst: that our house and pets were gone. As we maneuvered through the wreckage, we could hear sirens from crushed cars and the smell of natural gas was everywhere.

Finally, we walked up McEwen toward the back of our house - there it was, intact. The largest trees closest to the house had fallen at 45- degree angles across the front and side yards, but nothing had fallen on the house. The cats were a little traumatized, there were sections of the roof torn down to the bare wood, an entire eave was snapped off and the whole house was full of glass and debris. But we were among the lucky ones.



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