The Virginian-Pilot
© May 1, 2008
People talk tornadoes every time a stiff wind blows.
They said it must have been a twister that took down all those trees in Bay Colony in 2003 during Hurricane Isabel.
I went the day after Isabel. I saw the trees, the crushed roofs. A tornado, I agreed.
Now that I’ve been to Suffolk, I’m not so sure.
What Isabel left behind was mostly a mess. Monday’s tornado left Armageddon.
Weird, you could smell the damage before you could see it. The raw, pungent essence of trees was blowing across U.S. 58 on Tuesday morning.
Suddenly, a wide, savage gash came into view. The highway was book ended by trees, broken and shredded, their tops ripped off and pulp exposed, as if some angry behemoth had cleared a path on its way to somewhere else.
The somewhere else was Burnetts Mill and Hillpoint Farms and Driver. The splintered trees, just a prelude.
I headed to Driver.
Once there, it was impossible not to gawk. Everyone was doing it. We gaped at the random damage. Stared at structures turned inside out, roofs peeled away, stores flattened and cut in half.
When you’ve tiptoed through the rubble of a tornado, you understand why primitive people feared angry deities. With no knowledge of cold fronts and storm cells, they must have trembled in terror – wondering what they’d done wrong – as angry black funnel clouds dropped from the sky to wreak devastation and then skitter away.
We know what causes these capricious killers. It doesn’t make them any less fearsome.
“Praise the Lord, I wasn’t home,” said Dee Detwiler, as she led me through her brick ranch house to survey the damage.
“It looks like a tornado hit my house,” she joked, carefully opening the doors to two bedrooms strewn with bricks and glass. Beams had speared her sturdy walls as if launched by a giant.
On the lawn, an army of teenagers marched back and forth, carting debris – chunks of roofs, aluminum siding, shattered beams – to the curb.
Friends? I asked her.
“I don’t know most of them,” Detwiler said. “I think these kids live up the street in the new part of town. They didn’t have school today, so their parents told them to come down and help.”
Despite the damage, Detwiler was feeling blessed. She could look across the street at Gregory A. Parker’s house.
He was home alone when the tornado hit. The 54-year-old Driver native hadn’t heard about the approaching monster.
It felt like it was going to rain, he said, so Parker started up the stairs of his pre-Civil War house – the one his grandfather had moved to this spot in the 1930s – to close windows. Suddenly, it didn’t seem like rain anymore.
“The air felt funny,” Parker recalled, rubbing the day-old growth on his cheeks, as he stood in the middle of the street. “Everything seemed yellow.”
Glass started breaking, the floors shook, and Parker found himself holding onto the walls.
Seconds later, the front of his house blew off. The white clapboard house now shows its insulation innards.
“I think it’s still structurally sound,” Parker said.
“My family’s safe,” he added quickly. “I have insurance. Fortunately no one was killed.”
Driver was always a quaint Suffolk outpost. An old-time oasis in a booming city that changed daily.
Oh, they’ll rebuild, no doubt about it.
But the monster tornado of 2008 will haunt this place every time the wind roars and storms darken the sky.
Kerry Dougherty, (757) 446-2306, kerry.dougherty@cox.net
Article published Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Tornadoes savaged Virginia but spared lives
Residents and rescue personnel survey damage
to an antiques store in Driver, Va. Six tornadoes roared through Virginia on
Monday, injuring 200. All of the victims are expected to survive. |
SUFFOLK, Va. - It was a scene of haphazard destruction
that stretched for 25 miles: Row upon row of homes reduced to splintered lumber,
shopping centers stripped to bare metal, parking lots turned into junkyards.
Yet no one died.
"The only thing I can say is we were watched over and blessed," Fire Chief Mark Outlaw said.
As residents and rescuers returned yesterday to survey the wreckage from six tornadoes, they were amazed by both the scope of the damage and their good fortune.
Even among the 200 people who were injured, most suffered only cuts and scrapes.
Authorities said people in the storms' path had plenty of warning and were fortunate that the strongest of the twisters struck in the late afternoon, rather than at night, when most residents would have been sleeping.
The extra few minutes provided enough time for people to huddle in bathrooms or crouch in the back of stores as the tornado zigzagged for 10 miles. The twister, along with the storm that spawned it, left a 25-mile swath of damage across central and southeast Virginia.
|
Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, who declared a state of emergency in the hardest-hit areas, said about 145 homes were severely damaged in Suffolk, a city of 80,000 people west of Norfolk.
Most of the injured had been released from hospitals.
"It is kind of amazing there weren't more significant injuries," Mr. Kaine said on WTOP radio in Washington. "You are talking about 145 homes; that is probably 5 to 600 people directly affected by this tornado."
As he toured damaged neighborhoods later, Mr. Kaine said the number of people hurt or killed would have been much higher had the tornado struck a few hours later.
"There's definitely a miraculous quality to this," he said.
At least three people were hospitalized in fair condition as of last evening, said Dana Woodson, spokesman for the city of Suffolk.
The tornado that hit Suffolk touched down repeatedly between 4:30 and 5 p.m. Monday, when many people were still at work or on their way home.
"I'm not lucky, I'm blessed," said Brenda Williams, 43, who was pulled Monday from the rubble of a manicure shop where the ceiling had collapsed.
Ms. Williams said she wasn't sure how long she'd been trapped. She had a gash stitched above her left eyebrow and stitches on her right forearm. "I'm fine. I'm here," she said. "I'm in the land of the living."
She went back to the shopping center yesterday to retrieve possessions from her car, which was flipped onto its roof in the parking lot.
The National Weather Service confirmed that tornadoes also hit Brunswick County, about 60 miles west, and Colonial Heights, about 60 miles northwest. Three other twisters hit in Isle of Wight and Surry counties, and along the line separating Gloucester and Mathews counties, all in southeast Virginia.
The other tornadoes caused far less damage than the twister that ravaged Suffolk.
RED CROSS: