Picture of the Dr. Pepper Bottling Company after infamous 1953 tornado
Posted on 04/30/2006 10:47:21 AM PDT by sully777
A storm alarm two blocks down Kendall Lane remained silent as the walls of 19-year-old Shelby White’s second-story bedroom caved in.
She had just climbed into bed with her Rhodesian Ridgeback, Margot, when the tornado hit at about 12:30 a.m. Saturday morning. The Baylor University freshman crawled through the mound of shattered glass and fragmented beams that was once her parent’s house at 2629 Kendall Lane and walked down the street to find help. Neighbor George Gobea answered the door. The retired city purchasing agent had been huddled in a hall closet with five family members during the minutes of what he said sounded like a freight train through the wind. Minutes earlier, Gobea said he had been watching local weather reports warning only of severe thunder storms.
“I was just about to get out of bed and shut the blinds, when I heard glass shattering and things were falling on me. I dove into the corner of my room and that’s when I hit my head on something,” said White, whose parents Greg and Ellen were in Houston for a wedding rehearsal. “I was yelling for Margot as I was climbing out of the house, but couldn’t find her. All I could think was, ‘The house is gone and I just killed the dog.’”
White found Margot hiding in the barn early Saturday morning. The family’s outdoor dog, Rex, was trapped under supply wood thrown by the tornado that ripped through the 3200 block of Orchard Lane to the 2600 block of Kendall in southeast Waco.
Cleanup crews later discovered that two horses had been struck and killed by debris from a destroyed lean-to barn and horse arena. The horses were property of the Baylor University women’s equestrian program, which is in its first year. Ellen White, the program’s coach, had been housing about 10 Baylor horses on the property until construction finished on a 45,000-square-foot facility off University-Parks Drive. The leveled barn and horse arena were also property of Baylor.
“They said the horses probably died instantly because the barn just crashed right in on them,” said Shelby, whose father, Greg, is a local attorney. “All the other horses came out of the storm with minor injuries. They’re just a little shook up.”
McLennan County emergency management coordinator Frank Patterson said White’s house and one of two barns were completely leveled, and that a second house on Orchard Lane was “heavily damaged.” No people were severely injured during the tornado, but Patterson said about a half-dozen houses, barns and smaller buildings along Kendall and Orchard Lanes were damaged. The American Red Cross helped shelter about 14 displaced people. Patterson said that he “couldn’t even take a guess right now” as to putting a dollar amount on the damage caused by the tornado.
Patterson said that the storm siren is activated by his office and was not triggered because there weren’t sufficient indicators that a tornado could form in the area.
“We look at radar data and when the National Weather Service has markings of tornadic activity, and there was none of that,” Patterson said. “It just came out of nowhere.”
National Weather Service meteorologist Jesse Moore said that wind speeds were estimated up to about 60 mph in the area overnight Friday and into the early Saturday hours. He said that there is no minimum threshold for wind speed for tornadoes, but said that weak tornadoes can be as low as 50 mph, with stronger tornadoes topping 100 mph.
Gary Woodall, NWS warning coordinator meteorologist, examined the scene on Saturday and said that there were indications that wind speeds exceeded the initial 60 mph estimate.
“We had radar that showed (wind speed) around 100 miles per hour 4,000 feet above the ground, but it probably didn’t quite reach that on the ground,” Woodall said.
The storm carved a path about 200 feet wide and about three-quarters of a mile long, Woodall said. The path widened even more when it hit an open field, Woodall added, but there were no structures affected in that field.
Friends of Shelby’s grandmother, Peggy McGregor, who lost her first husband in the 1953 tornado, brought donuts, sandwiches and drinks to the site Saturday afternoon. They exchanged hugs and sifted through remains in the attic and Shelby’s room, which were the only two rooms partially intact. The Whites were trying to salvage furniture and heirlooms before nightfall.
Ellen White worked to move the remaining 23 horses to McLennan Community College’s Highlander Ranch until the barn could be repaired. Fire crews secured the site as TXU Energy workers struggled to control a gas leak on the White’s property. TXU spokesman Tony Flores said that power to homes along Kendall and Orchard was restored between 9 and 10 a.m. Patterson could not give a time estimate for how long it would take crews to clear the debris.
Kimberly King, of 2600 Kendall Lane, was on the computer when the windows of her parents’ house began to rattle and her computer lost power. She woke her parents, James and Patricia, and they gathered in the middle of the one-story home.
“It felt like the house was going to come down,” King said. “It was really loud for about 10 seconds and then nothing. It stopped raining. It was like the calm after the storm.”
Kenny Pritchard was sitting on the porch with his wife when the tornado hit about a block away from their home, located on an Orchard Lane side street.
“My wife and I were enjoying the rain and I heard this awful noise,” Pritchard said. “It was wild, I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. This was worse than a hurricane.”
It wasn’t Pritchard’s first brush with destructive weather.
He and his wife were displaced from their Polk County home when it was destroyed by Hurricane Rita in September. Pritchard and his wife moved to Waco, about a block from his mother’s house on Orchard. Though Pritchard’s house was untouched by Saturday’s tornado, he said his mother was not so lucky.
“There’s amazing damage,” Pritchard said of his mother’s property. “She lost all three barns, a storage building and about 300 yards of fence. There’s tractors, weed-eaters, picnic tables, everything all over the place.”
Pritchard said the tornado damage is just another blow in a string of bad events for his mother, Laura, 53, beginning with the death of her husband about three years ago.
To make matters worse, Pritchard said that they are having a hard time getting insurance adjusters to come to his mother’s house, which he said is fully insured.
“We can’t get them to respond to us at all,” Pritchard said.
The storm was one of several that battered North Texas Friday night and Saturday morning. One storm with winds up to 100 mph and baseball-sized hail leveled buildings in Gainesville, uprooted trees and slammed more than a dozen airplanes into one another at an airport. No injuries have been reported so far.
The young lady is extremely lucky to be alive, and if she'd followed conventional wisdom and taken shelter on the bottom floor of the house she might be dead. This house is about 8 miles northeast of me and I slept through the whole storm system. Knew heavy thunderstorms were moving through, but nothing I heard or saw set off my personal radar. I know our tornado sirens never went off.
I remember that Baylor said sliding was off-limits on the softball fields, because that's where a lot of debris from the 1953 tornado was buried, and some of it comes back up from time to time.
Uh, nope, not going there....
FMCDH(BITS)
Oh, that's just great...I have to be in Waco a week from now. I'm a California boy; I don't know nuthin 'bout no tornados...
When the sky is green and the locals are looking up it's time to start planning. Other than that, it will be hot next week.
Sirens did go off in Fort Worth Friday night, but as far as I know there were no tornados in the area.
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