Tornado

Yes, a tornado can happen in Arizona. At 5:30 on Wednesday I awoke to a nightmare. It had been stormy all night but it was getting worse and worse. Soon it was hailing and I was getting nervous. The power went out and then my entire house started shaking. Cole woke up and looked out the window. I asked him if it was an earthquake. He said no and then came back to bed.

Shortly thereafter a friend called me to see if we were okay. She then told me it was a tornado and that her windows broke. She said there were more on the way. Cole and I quickly got up, checked our house, and got Lexi. We prepared our bathroom as a shelter. We called our other neighbors to see if they were okay. They were all okay but they all had broken windows and roof problems. We waited for the next tornado to come but it hit north of us. Around 8 we left our house to go see the damage. The first picture is of our house. We were really fortunate. All of our windows were okay and we haven't had any roof problems. We drove down our street to see that our friends home didn't make out so well. They ended up with a sink attached to their home. It was from an RV store across the freeway. About this time the Sheriff told people to seek shelter because another one was coming.

We got home safely but luckily the other tornado didn't hit our area. Amazingly no one was seriously injured during the events. One of the tornado's derailed a train across the freeway from my house. When the freeway opened later that morning some men from our ward that lived in town brought out some wood to help board up windows. Cole went to help them. The frustrating part was that the storm was still happening through all of this. From 5:30 until 2:30 we had thunder and lightning and hail. All those men had to board windows and patch roofs during this terrible storm. It made me very nervous to send Cole. I was very glad when he returned home safe. Later he told me about a man that nearly fell off one of the roofs because there was so much hail on it.

The power was out all day and our house got power back around 6pm. We were so glad because it was going to be a cold night. Later that night we met up with members of our ward and heard their stories. They have been running through my mind ever since. They were hit extremely hard. Most of the pictures below are of members homes. They won't be returning to their homes for a long time. Each of them had a story of a way they were blessed during this experience. Even though terrible things happened Heavenly Father watched over their families. One woman told me that she felt blessed because earlier in the night her daughter came into her room because she was scared. The tornado hit that daughters room the hardest. She said there were chunks of glass stabbed into the mattress. She was so thankful her daughter wasn't in there. Everyone had a story like this to tell. I feel very blessed to have been watched over. I feel so bad for the people I know that have been affected.