Lucked Out With Little Damage || Tornado In Virginia
Tornado Through the Heart of Virginia?
Houses were leveled off their foundations and trees fell through homes as a tornado touched down about 3.5 miles from my location.
The tornado touched down and ripped up light posts that had been installed in paved parked lots...cars were flipped over and businesses had their store front windows and doors smashed.
It all started when I was on the phone with my brother about coming over to my house because I had just returned from vacation and his wife had asked if I could help get her started with programs and tips in her venture into graphic & web design. As we're talking my phone starts vibrating at a pace that was highly unusual so I look to see what the notification is and it reads that there has been a tornado sighting and to take immediate cover in a basement. Ironically my roommates and I had just walked in from looking at the wild wind outside and were already in the basement. My other brother @spaceiscool lives with me and at that moment he looks at me and asks 'Did you feel that'? I said yeah that was really weird. It felt like a giant had stomped the ground and created a seismic wave. I've not been in an earthquake and I'd say it was most likely a completely different feeling of power or pressure. At that moment I noticed outside the window that a huge tree limb had fallen over our deck.
We had talked about closing the windows upstairs when we were outside and so we ran upstairs to close the windows and in a matter of seconds water had flew in and drenched my brother's bed and our kitchen and dining room floors were soaking wet as if it had been raining inside the house. After closing all the windows in the house we went outside on the deck to get a look at the tree limb that fell and we noticed it had completely missed from hitting our deck because it was caught on the roof. It narrowly missed a window and then I looked around the backyard a bit more and found that an even larger limb had fallen about 15 yards from the house and looked to be leaning on the corner of our chain-link fence. I ran over to it and realized that again we had gotten lucky and that the largest part of the limb had wedged itself into a neighboring tree. Because of that limb getting wedged it had barely bent a top pole on the fence.
After it was all said and done we realized compared to all the other houses in the surrounding areas that we had just barely been scathed. There was about 20 feet of gutter that had been totally destroyed and only 6-8 shingles that were ruined. I will say that we faced the next day a dangerous task of removing the two limbs without causing any more damage and they were both in compromised positions. With the help of my brothers, my sister-in-law, my roommate, and a new chainsaw...we managed to neutralize the limbs so as not to cause anymore damage.
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