Quick action saves couple from twister
ADEL, Ga. — Bonnie and Wayne Collier were jolted awake in their mobile home by a cellphone weather alert early Sunday. They jumped up, turned on the TV, saw a tornado warning and decided to run.
“We heard the Code Red,” said Bonnie Collier, 65. “He told me, ‘Get up. We’ve got to get out.”
Quickly, they headed to a friend’s nearby building just down the road from their mobile home near Cecil, Ga. There they met up with their son, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren — ages 5, 7 and 9 — who they awoke at their mobile home.
They arrived just ahead of a tornado.
“My husband yelled, ‘Get under the tables!’ and then it just came right over the top of us like a freight train.”
When they emerged, the home they had been sleeping in was blown clear across the street, flattened and shattered to pieces. Her car and his pickup truck were buried under debris. But the other home was undamaged.
“If we had been five minutes later, they probably would have found us out here somewhere dead.”
An unusual midwinter barrage of tornadoes and thunderstorms over the weekend was blamed for at least 20 deaths across the Deep South.
Collier returned Monday to pick through the wreckage, pulling out clothes and family photos with a mix of smiles and tears.
She laughed as 5-year-old granddaughter Rylee ran up, holding a photo and excitedly shouting “Mimi! This one’s of you.” But moments earlier, she choked back sobs talking about how she could have lost much more than her home.
“Material things can be put back and replaced and family can’t. And I’m just glad we got out OK,” she said, wiping away a tear.
Mobile homes were especially vulnerable to the storms, with seven people alone killed early Sunday in one trailer park community a few miles away — Sunshine Acres — in the community of Adel.
Just the day after Devocheo Williams moved into Sunshine Acres, his mobile home — and many of those around him — were demolished as the winds descended before dawn with terrifying swiftness.
“The whole trailer park was gone in 15 seconds,” Williams said, describing a funnel cloud that appeared to loop back around and hit the place a second time. “It looked like a ball of fire was going 100 mph.”
Williams said Monday he saw a little girl picked up by the winds and tossed into a ditch. Nearby, the girl’s mother and a baby were trapped in rubble. He said he helped dig them out.
Not everyone could be saved.
“I was walking by dead bodies of little kids and grown people,” Williams said.
Georgia reported 15 deaths Sunday, and four people died Saturday in Mississippi. In northern Florida, a woman died after a tree crashed into her home in Lake City.
The National Weather Service said 39 possible tornadoes were reported.
