Tornadoes at our doorstep and hope on the horizon
I had never truly been scared for my life until a tornado ripped through our neighborhood. To be honest, I was more scared for my kids than anything. The whole experience was terrifying and I’m still not quite over it. Neither are our neighbors.
Myers Park and Woodland Drives look like a war zone. I’m sure other areas nearby do too, but I just haven’t had a chance to see them yet. We love our trees here, but man do they turn into a problem when an EF-2 tornado shows up for breakfast.
At 7 a.m. last Friday, while watching the local news forecast about an impending squall line, our phones rang with an alert the meteorologist told our area to brace for tornado impacts. At that very instant, the power went out and the morning sky turned a biblical shade of black. A sucking wind sound intensified by the second and I screamed for my wife to help me get the kids.
Debris began to fly, and our home sounded like it was taking on mortar fire. I snatched my 3-year-old son from a dead sleep and whisked him into the hallway. My wife grabbed our daughter from playing in her room and hurriedly joined us. We huddled under a crib mattress and prayed like we were hiding from enemy fire in a foxhole together.
Snap, crackle, pop, thud! The sounds normally reserved for breakfast cereal jingles now were amplified as towering pine trees crashed all around our block. All we could do was hold each other and hope none of them landed on our head.
Then, after only a minute or so, the worst of it passed. I walked to the front of our home and could make my first damage assessment. Our house was spared any major issues. A tree fell from the neighbor’s yard, smashed their car, and crashed at our front steps. Only the gutter was dented. Two other pines were down but only a kids play fort and outdoor furniture were lost. We’re still counting those blessings.
Close friends across the street and down the block had trees destroy their roofs leaving gaping holes in their homes. As I began to walk around the area later, I saw dozens and dozens were facing the same scenario. Streets were blocked, power lines mangled, and the whole area smelled like a pine-scented car freshener. Our close-nit residential retreat inside Magnolia Drive had turned into ground zero for a natural disaster.
This week, the city of Tallahassee confirmed that there were more broken power poles from this storm than in Hurricanes Hermine, Michael, and Irma combined. You can imagine what that means for our shallow rooted pines across the southern half of Leon County. All of which makes the speed of the response I’ve witnessed this week so impressive.
First came the tree companies, then the roofers, and of course city line workers. All here to help and plot the course of recovery. The sounds of chainsaws grinding, and generators humming have been our soundtrack sense the storm, but things are improving. Roads are being cleared, debris piled, and tarps laid. Hope is becoming more available.
It may be a while before we can take a walk through our favorite park, enjoy the charms of our historic neighborhoods, or even look at our trees with the same reverence, but that’s ok. We’ll figure all that out in time. What matters now is that folks get back in their homes, businesses reopen, and we contemplate how to reconcile being fortunate in an unfortunate situation.
I love our neighbors and our neighborhood and despite the widespread damage, I’m eternally grateful that nobody we know was seriously harmed or killed. For a few minutes last Friday, that sure seemed unlikely. Let’s pray some normalcy returns to our forecast soon.
Jay Revell is president and chief storyteller at Revell Media, a branding and marketing agency in Tallahassee, Florida.
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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Tornadoes at our doorstep and hope on the horizon
