Carmen Harrell stood next to the space where her 82-year-old father’s manufactured home used to be and wondered if it was worth trying to find his Navy yearbook.
She had picked him up from Spanish Lakes Country Club Village about 2:30 p.m. Wednesday. Just a half-hour later, the first tornado barreled through, damaging his home. A short while after that, a second one swept the entire home away.
“Thing I keep thinking about, is how close,” Harrell said Thursday. “If I would’ve just waited an hour, if we had hung out for another thirty minutes.”
Harrell and her father had only left when they did because it had started to rain. Her neighbor, Paul, had been putting up storm shutters.
“I was like, ‘you know what, Paul? Don’t even worry about it,’” Harrell recalled saying. “We were getting drenched.”
Five people are confirmed dead in the area of Spanish Lakes, according to the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office. On Thursday, neighbors picked through rubble while first responders checked for bodies, marking homes with different colored X’s. Sheriff Keith Pearson couldn’t give an estimate of how many people were injured or still missing, but said deputies had transported hundreds of people to hospitals and responded to as many as six tornadoes.
“We don’t know because there’s nothing left,” he said. “Just a pile of rubble. There’s no front doors to these homes … when you have piles and piles of debris, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
The over-55 Spanish Lakes Communities are a collection of developments with one- to three-bedroom homes, or trailers.
One of the Spanish Lakes residents believed dead was a veteran in his 60s or 70s. Neighbors said a tornado had picked up his home, with him inside, and turned it into a pile of debris. A neighbor who lived across the street said he was the one who later found him.
“We were really good friends,” the neighbor said, becoming emotional.
Another neighbor Douglas Reed, 82, worked as a gunsmith at a local gun shop. A veteran himself, he said he and the tornado victim used to hang out together.
When the tornadoes came, Reed told his wife to stand with him in the hallway.
“I said, ‘This’ll be over in a couple minutes, one way or another,’” he recalled Thursday, standing next to a neighbor as he inspected the contents of a filing cabinet that was now in his yard. Reed simply felt grateful to be alive. “What more can you ask for?” he said.
Nearby, Bruce Myers bent over a tree.
“I can’t believe I’m still here,” he said.
After the first tornado swept through, he recalled, an hour or so later, a second tornado came. That night, first responders began assessing the damage and pulling bodies out of ruined homes and debris.
“It was a morgue here last night,” Myers said.
Harrell said she returned later to find a trailer up in a tree. Her husband saw officials putting someone in a stretcher into a garage. A man with a bloody forehead tried to peel the carport off of his truck. Listlessly, people swept.
“Everyone was walking around like zombies,” she said.
Harrell had left her father’s home that afternoon worrying about his sliding glass doors, if they might break or damage his TV. When she heard it was damaged, she thought she’d see some shattered windows, or holes in walls. Not the vast empty space that had once been his trailer.
“I didn’t realize the whole thing was missing,” she said. “My husband was like, ‘no, honey, that was his, where the stairs are.’”
The damage wasn’t limited to Spanish Lakes. In nearby Holiday Pines, Nicole Gaza went into the master bathroom of the home she had lived in for nine years Wednesday afternoon to escape the storm after she saw a tree fall.
“We opened the door and we were in the backyard,” she said.
On Thursday, Gaza and her husband, Shane Ostrander stood in the twisted chunk of what was once their home with an almost resigned sense of humor. The tornado had ripped off the new roof they had paid $40,000 for and left it twisted around a nearby tree. As Gaza spoke, Ostrander managed to fish through enough debris to find her cellphone, either destroyed or dead, like most people’s, with no power to charge anything or service to communicate with anyone.
Jonathan Wright lives a few doors down from Gaza and survived with only an 8-foot hole in the back of his house. He had been outside when the tornado came through. As he was running, he recalled it lifting him, pushing him forward, as big trees “snapped like toothpicks.” He had a video but couldn’t watch it because his phone was dead.
Boats that had once sat docked in the neighborhood now appeared capsized on their lawns and leaning against their homes.
Like Gaza, a woman who identified herself only with her first name, Ortensia, had just spent $25,000 on a new roof that the tornado lifted up on both ends. Her brother, sister and grandchildren had all come over from Tampa to stay with her and get away from the storm. Now, all were without power and water.
“We weren’t expecting nothing but a little wind and rain,” Ortensia said as she stood outside on the lawn, near a discarded Adidas slide. “Made a liar out of me.”
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