Monday, March 31st 2008, 10:47 pm
Sunday's late night tornado left its mark on one Edmond neighborhood. Several homes took a direct hit in the Valencia subdivision near NW 182 and Pennsylvania Avenue. Homeowners in about a dozen homes are cleaning up. Amazingly, just about everyone was home, when the tornado touched down. It hit in the cover of darkness with a ferocious sound.
"The pressure was building and building and building and it stopped and then there was a loud ‘caboom'," Edmond resident, Brian Martin said.
The pressure popped ears, blew out windows and ripped apart roofs.
"I could hear banging, a lot of wood cracking," Marci Isaccson said. "You could just hear it going ‘shhhh'."
In the daylight, homeowners saw the destruction for the first time.
Marci Isaccson's home is in the worst shape.
"I barely made it too," Issacson said. "I fell down right here and I heard glass break."
She rode out the storm in the laundry room with her 4-year-old twins.
"I just heard glass and I kept hanging on to the boys cause I was so afraid we were going to get sucked up, you hear about that," Issacson said.
The family survived, as did everyone else on the street.
Brian Martin left his bedroom, 15 minutes before the twister hit.
"Had I actually been sound asleep, I either would have had the glass cut me to pieces or I would've been killed by the impact," Martin said.
The tornado was Martin's first; he moved to Oklahoma from Florida where he's more used to hurricanes.
"You have notice a couple of days before the storm's coming so you can prepare," Martin said. "This completely caught me off guard. I had no idea it was happening."
What surprises him, and his neighbors, is the strange damage Mother Nature causes.
"I saw that the fence sliced through the roof there pretty quick, that was interesting," resident John Hoffman said.
Despite all the interesting and upsetting devastation, there's a silver lining.
"I'm alive, that's the important thing, everything else can be replaced," Martin said.
March 31st, 2008
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