I always thought that our house was protected from tornadoes because of it's surrounding geography, on February 22, I learned it was not. As we sat at our computers, me in the kitchen, Freddy at his in the dining room, and Nicole in her room, we heard a mighty rushing wind headed straight for us.
Freddy had just told me that he was looking at the National Weather Service radar and saw a storm near Cedar Bluff with a red hook in it. Then the sound came. It was a low rumble and we ran for the hallway our dog and cat following us. We had no time for anything else, there was no warning, only that low rumble that said something we couldn't see in the dark of night was on a direct path to us.
We laid on the floor for less than a minute as the roar grew louder and changed in pitch from a bass note to the highest pitch I'd ever heard and never hope to again. It screamed as it passed our home and our house's natural resonance caused it to sing with the storm. The storm and our home was on the same frequency that is one of the most interesting things I learned about in physics. A forcing function that is variable becomes the same frequency as the structure, there is oscillation that occurs. That is what happened at our house. Within just a few seconds, the house had cracks that appeared in all the walls and the ceilings. I shudder to think what would have happened had the tornado been stronger than an EF-1.
I called 911 and told the operator that we had been hit by a tornado. "No," she said, "It was straight-line winds. The National Weather Service will be out tomorrow to access the damage." I told her she was wrong, I knew we had been hit by a tornado and so did Freddy and Nicole. There was no mistaking what we had heard and felt for anything else. I told her that the storm had blocked our ears, sucked the air out of our lungs and the house, and we had damage that was not straight-line wind damage. The trees were sucked in to us from more than one direction and not laying one way. The next day the NWS confirmed a tornado that was only 75 yards wide and 3.2 miles long. We also found out that radar cannot pick up storms that are under 5000 feet in altitude as this storm was. You can see in Maplewood, the neighborhood just west of us exactly where it began.
By the time we would have really been scared, the tornado had come and gone. Nicole and I started out the backdoor and we couldn't go anywhere because the beautiful sycamore tree that had shaded our driveway for more than a 100 years was laying in our path and the downspout lay across the steps. The downspout was easy to move, the tree had fallen more than a 100 feet and pushed in the window on the glass porch, broken the window in the dining room, and crushed Freddy's truck and very nearly destroyed Nicole's car.
The front was no better. The post oak that we loved and shaded the front porch for between 100-150 years was laying on the ground too. Luckily for us, both trees had fallen parallel to the house or much more damage would have been done. The post oak was a beautiful tree too. It's huge root ball was pulled up from the ground and still lays exposed in the yard.
On the north side of our house, along the property line was a group of white pines that must have been planted in the 30's when our home was built. We lost two to Hurricane Fran hit in 1996 we found them on the ground the next morning after an anxious night where I stayed up and wrote letters to relatives and friends because I couldn't sleep as the barometer dropped and dropped. These old trees were over a 100 feet tall and seeing the rest of them down really shook me to my core.
I have always called our home Twin Magnolias. In those few brief seconds the north magnolia was stripped of limbs on the north side. We had become Magnolia and a Half. The next day when Brad Prater and his crew of volunteers from the Church at Northpoint came walking into our yard asking if we needed help we were amazed and delighted that God had sent an old friend to us. His crew cut the remaining half of the magnolia down and we became Mono-a-Magnolia. Our remaining magnolia in the front yard is huge and one of the largest in the area. It has some small damage to the east side, but it will recover. It has been our pride and joy for 28 years and I'm hoping for the rest of our lives.
Many churches worked in our yard all weekend, Northpoint, Spring Creek Baptist, Pleasant Valley South Baptist, and Trinity are ones that I remember. They cut and hauled trees with a bobcat and a tractor. Brad said they'd return to finish and I don't doubt him. Someone left a John Deer tractor and trailer in our yard and I'm fairly certain they are not giving them to us.
We lost about 9-10 trees that were ours. The shock was all the trees that came from the property lines of our neighbor's on the north and south side. With ours and theirs all on our property, trees covered both sides of yard, around the house, and at the road. I have counted around 50 on the ground but there are more that are still covered with so many limbs and debris that we can't see their bases and they are just mixed up in the fray.
At some point in time in the future, things will return to normal, well, the "new" normal. Our house and roof will be repaired, the yard will be pretty again. Life continues on and Mono-a-Magnolia still stands. We were lucky. We were able to survive with no injuries, things and belongings will be replaced. We will cry over trees lost that were like old friends. We will though, never forget the night of February 22, 2012.
