A tornado rips through their North Texas home as they hang on for survival
It all started like another stormy morning in North Texas.
Isabella Gonzalez was in the bathroom getting ready for work inside their single-story home a few miles south of Decatur.
Then came a boom. Power goes out. In the darkness she could hear her mom, Bertha, screaming.
“The house was shaking and ... like the windows, were making a really loud noise. And then I heard, like all the windows shattering in the kitchen. And then I just grabbed onto the bar that was in the restroom.”
A major winter storm that was expected to bring heavy snow, strong winds and ice to the northern Plains and Upper Midwest roared through North Texas on Tuesday morning. It spawned five tornadoes — potentially up to 12 may have occurred — causing damage from Decatur to North Richland Hills to Grapevine before moving east. An EF-2 tornado tracked through Wise County packing winds of up to 125 mph, according to the National Weather Service.
“I mean, we heard about all this happening, but I didn’t think we were (getting a tornado) today,” Gonzalez said.
There were six people in the house when the twister tore through their home: Gonzalez, her three children, her sister, Maria, and her mother Bertha.
A clearly shaken Bertha sat on a chair under a porch canopy wiping tears off her face. Her granddaughter, Isa, stroked her abuela’s graying hair, comforting her the best way she could.
Gonzalez stood outside her home — at least what remained of it — speaking to a gaggle of reporters barely two hours from when the tornado hit. Tree limbs were strewn across the front yard. A child’s bicycle sat on its side next to a cabinet shelf. Yesterday’s mail was still in the mailbox untouched.
“That’s pretty scary. I mean, I was getting ready for work and I had told my mom, ‘I’m gonna take the shower real quick so I can get ready for work’.” Gonzalez told the Star-Telegram. “I had just woken up my kiddos and they were getting ready for school. It was about seven in the morning. All of a sudden, I heard like a big, like, boom. And then … ”
Everything went dark. Rain started pouring into the house.
“The first sound I heard was kind of like a thunder clap. And then it was a bunch of wind and a gust of air, then a bunch of rain and then all like, like a little bit of silence,” she said.
The silence was short lived. Gonzalez said she started hearing the windows break. Then the roof of their house collapsed.
“I was so scared,” she said.
From the damage on the ground, it looked like the tornado made its way northeast, carving a path through a pasture and taking down pretty white vinyl fences, before hitting the Gonzalez home. It then crossed FM 730 into Cecily Pegues’ ranch, ripping trees in half and taking down a large live oak tree that just missed the ranch house.
Amy Pegues came out to check on her sister. She stood on a corner of her sister’s ranch, tree limbs strewn around the wet grass. Half a tree a foot wide stood with its top ripped clean. Cars slowed down on the highway as motorists gawked at the scene.
Lynn Clay, who came out with Pegues, said he was getting ready to have his first cup of coffee when thunder shook his house. Rain was really coming down. Then his phone chirped out a tornado warning.
“So, I went outside with my coffee to see what was going on,” Clay said. “Rain was pouring down. It was coming down so hard it was flooding my porch.”
He said he didn’t see anything except the sky was dark and angry.
“I had no idea” a twister touched down just a couple of miles down the road, he said.
Inside the Gonzalez home the scene was right out of a horror movie. They’d never experienced a tornado before.
“All I heard was, I think, the roof caving in and coming off. All the windows are breaking in the back side of the house. It was really, really loud,” Gonzalez said. “My sister said she got on top of (the children) to protect them … they were just scared. My mom was crying and yelling.”
