A year ago this morning I was awakened early by Tony telling us we needed to go take cover because a tornado was headed our way. To be honest, I didn't want to get up, but I did, and we went to our shelter. When we came out, part of our roof was gone and our neighbor was trapped in her house with multiple trees down on it. Our power was out, so that was the end of any TV coverage of the storms for us. Little did we know at that time that this was just the beginning.
I checked radar on my phone and it looked like we had some time before the next round of storms, so I got ready and headed over to the office. There were a lot of trees down along the way, but no major damage. When I arrived at my parent's house and the office they had lost some Bradford Pear trees, and the chairs had blown through the railing on their back deck and were scattered on the lawn. They also had no power, so I put the chairs in the storage area under the house and headed back home.
The rest of the day is somewhat of a blur. Because of the power outage and phone towers down it was difficult to get signal on my phone, so we decided to drive toward Fort Payne in hopes of better signal and also to purchase a weather radio. I had always used my phone for weather alerts but because it was not working so well I wanted to purchase the radio. (Pic: Trying to get signal on cell phone at the house)
We picked up some weather coverage on the radio as we were driving and I tried to keep an eye on the radar on my phone. I remember seeing several large red storms moving across the area. We drove back up 117 toward Ider and when we got to the 4-way we could see off in the distance in front of us a huge storm.
Tony decided to take a shower with what little hot water was left and while he was in the bathroom my phone beeped that I had a voicemail message. I listened to it and didn't really comprehend it at first. It was from my parent's neighbor and she said that the house was gone but they were all ok. I kept thinking she was telling me about her house. When Tony came out we decided to drive over there and check on them.
Later we found out that storm we watched from the 4-way had crossed about 4-5 miles down the road from our house. It was an F5 tornado and had already destroyed the homes of 3 of our church families, had killed over a dozen people, and it was the same storm that eventually destroyed my parents home.
Even as we got closer to their area, we did not see extensive damage. The storm had come from the west and hit their home and we driving in from the east, so the first major damage that we saw was right in their neighborhood.
The first thing I noticed as turned on their road was that we could see the mountain in the distance. There used to be a tree line there, so the mountain was not visible. I think shock started to set in as we got closer to what was left of the house.
As we pulled out of their neighborhood we made a last minute decision to go stay with Krysten in Chattanooga instead of heading back to our house. Krysten still had power (and hot water) and that was our main reason for going there. Had we gone back to our house, we would have been driving back into another F4 tornado that was going through town around that time.
