So, Sunday night at roughly 1:21am (which i guess is actually monday morning) according to my clock, the world faded to back for me as I closed my eyes and watched the splashes of light from a distant storm fade against my blinds.
At roughly 1:46 am I shot up in bed. It's my opinion this was due to some tap on the shoulder by God or guttural instinct in my subconscious of what was about to ensue, because at the moment this happened NOTHING had happened yet. The room was still quiet, and there was a pitter patter against the window from rains first start; however, no more than a minute after I shot up looking around, disoriented, trying to figure out why I had, the electricity flickered out followed almost simultaneously by the most God awful sound I've heard in a while. Wind slammed the side of our building and literally sounded like a high pitch howl from a horror film. The windows began to shake and shudder, and the emergency exit at the end of our hall began slamming as though someone was trying to rip it off it's hinges. Almost immediately I ran into the hall to get my RA and see if they had access to a weather radio. My first thought was tornado, my second thought was "if this is not it's still one bad storm". The hall was flooded with girls because in our hall NO ONE slept through this event. You see, we live in the ghetto on campus, lol, so it pretty much sounded like the whole building was going to collapse despite being made of cinder blocks. At the time there was in fact no radio out, and all we kept hearing was no tornado warnings were in place. We stayed in the halls anyways afraid to stay to close to our giant glass windows found in all the rooms. Finally, about 20 minutes into this the wind died, the building was still standing, the electricity was till out, and we made our way back to room to try and rest before school. It was hard winding down, but the light lighting and thunder that followed actually helped to lull me off to sleep.
As morning beat back the dark and Waxahachie awoke the dammage from the night before none of us on campus knew took place was revealed. Thankfully no one in our town was hurt due to the storm. It turned out we were in fact under a tornado warning but no tornado touched down in our town. The closest any of the tornados got that night was 5 miles down the road in midlothian, and they were small. The irony though was this, despite not being hit by a tornado, the storm that slammed us at it's highest point that night delivered a punch of 95mph straight winds. These winds ripped into us like any F1 tornado would have but on a wider scale since the winds were not confined to a funnel. All over town trees were down, branches scattered, power was out, windows blown out, roof tops damaged/ torn off, trees on houses, etc etc etc. It was quite the sight to see. Some buildings were even demolished in part. On campus the only real damage was the roof of our Music Center( where no one was that night) which looked like someone grabbed the back end of it and tried to roll it back like it was a sardine can as a method of opening it from the top.
In the end, the storm that the weather service told us might at it's height have winds of 60mph and hail under an inch in diamater ended up delivering some surprises that night with golf ball size hail and winds way beyond the predicted speed. If you pray sends shot out for those whose homes received damages to their properties and send up a thanks that deadly potential wrapped up in this story no one was even injured due to it.
Below I've attached some photos if y'all want to see, God bless!
NEWSJACKPHOTOS/ALL DOWNTOWN WAXAHACHIE
CELLPHONE SHOTS W/IN 2 BLOCKS OF SCHOOL
