Thursday, June 03, 2010

Tornado Pt. 2

They described the sight: glass everywhere, stuff from near the door scattered everywhere inside. John left the bathroom and told us to stay there and nobody leave for any reason. We were still sitting in the dark checking up on the weather online (Wi-fi was still working somehow) and someone (I think Matt Reeves) was talking to his dad about the weather coming through and the damage that already occurred when we heard someone in the commons yell "Courtney! Courtney!" Hearing the name of his fiance, J-Mo flipped and ran out the door fearing that Courtney (Nute) was injured from being in the main room of the Commons. He returned to the bathroom and was calming down and told us they were just calling to her because she was a nursing student. He said a guy and a girl (who we later learned were not Union students) came into the Commons from a car. Jonathan said she was so cut up and bloody in her face that she was unrecognizable. We again started praying aloud. In the next few minutes we heard a lot of yelling as Ashley Jackson (Residence Director) and the RAs herded girls from one of the buildings (Grey? maybe) into the stairwells because there was a gas leak. With a lot of yelling they got them in there. At some point in the time that followed and ambulance arrived for the bloody girl. We were still sitting in the dark bathroom and John and J-Mo reported on how bad things were. Flipped cars were the main report so far, and they were saying it was worse than the reports we got about 2002. We sent out text messages to our family and emails as we could to try and let our parents know we were all right, but AT&T was not working real well at all. Some amount of time after the tornado they began to yell to all of us in the Commons that we needed to head toward the Pennick Academic Complex (PAC). We still hadn't seen anything first hand. As I stepped out of the bathroom all I noticed was that the commons had stuff everywhere, most notably Ashley Jackson's business cards, which had flown everywhere. We went out of the Commons toward the courtyard. I set down my notebook on the copier as we walked out. I honestly don't remember if there was a door as we walked out. The sight that met us was much worse than any of us had expected. It was dark, so we couldn't see well, but our eyes had already adjusted from being in the bathroom with no power. We saw Grey and Dodd when we first walked out, and we could see pretty clearly that the walls had fallen off the sides of the buildings. As we walked further we could see through windows that some sections of roof were completely missing. We could see parts of buildings in which only the frame was left. It looked like a set to a natural disaster movie, but it was real. It was all so real. As we walked toward the PAC, Sarah Simpson joined Austin and I walking. All the girls began to cry as we walked over the rubble in McAfee. The sights that would soon greet us were much worse. When we exited the courtyard we could see, backdropped by the dark sky, trees which were split in half. As we walked further we saw a pile of cars, with a red Celica sticking up above the rest. My only response to this was "Holy crap." We walked out to the road and found cars sitting in the middle as well as trees littering the walkways. Then we saw Hurt.