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Article published Feb 10, 2008 Witnesses to disaster: Blount natives recall experiences during deadly tornado
By Mark Boxley of The Daily Times Staff
After the roaring wind died down, leaving an eerie quiet hanging in the air, and after Maryville resident and Union University sophomore Emily Gillespie and her roommates crawled out from under the mattress they had used to protect themselves, the question wasn’t if the storm had killed someone, it was how many lives had it taken.
After walking out of her dorm to survey the damage on Feb. 5, Gillespie said “the first thing that came to my head was, ‘How many funerals am I going to have to go to?’” “Just because I could see the devastation of all the other dorms and they were just completely collapsed,” she said.
But while the storm destroyed an estimated 40 percent of the Jackson-based university’s dorms — with another 40 percent receiving substantial damage — 51 students were taken to the hospital, but none had life-threatening injuries. And that included the students who had been trapped for hours beneath the rubble left in the storm’s wake.
Michael Grubb, a Seymour resident and Union University sophomore, said he knew three of his close friends were trapped in what used to be the men’s commons building.
“That was probably the hardest thing for me, not even really the shock of seeing everything,” he said. “It really became a truth to me that people were dead when I walked outside and saw that everything had been demolished the way it was.
“I had to cope with that pretty fast and realize that some of my friends were the ones that were trapped,” he said.
His three friends, all soccer players, had been playing pingpong at the commons building when the tornado touched down. The building, “was in the direct path (of the tornado) and just collapsed completely on them,” Grubb said. “And they were trapped for anywhere from three to four hours, depending on who it was, under about 10 to 15 feet of debris.”
But it was his faith that helped him in that time, Grubb said.
“Just dealing with the God that I’ve dealt with for 20 years, I wasn’t worried,” he said. “I wasn’t every really concerned. I think God really divinely stepped in and gave me a peace, you know, in my helplessness.”
All three of Grubb’ friends were freed from the collapsed building — along with others who had been in the structure when it fell — and the next day, two of his friends were released from the hospital. The third is still in intensive care, Grubb said.
Justin Hobbs, a Townsend resident and Union sophomore, was working at his job at Sam’s Club when the storm hit. The lights went out, came back, and flickered again, but the store was not hit by the tornado.
Hobbs became concerned though, when he found out how bad the storm had been. Someone came up to him in the store “and they said, ‘I think your school’s gone,’” Hobbs said.
He got in his car and quickly drove back to campus, but couldn’t get through the gate because of debris and emergency vehicles. He finally parked at the Target across the street and ran to his dorm. The building was one of the structures that didn’t receive much damage, so at first things didn’t look so bad. But when he went around the back of the building “everything was gone,” he said. “That’s when it hit me that it was for real.”
Hobbs said he ran to the girls’ commons building “and I stood there and looked around for a while because there was like, fire engines, people screaming, all the noise.”
He ran to the Waters dorm and found one of his friends. “He was standing on what used to be Waters,” Hobbs said, explaining he realized moments later that there were still people trapped in the demolished building. “Another kid came up and said, ‘We’ve got to get them out.’ And I had no idea what he was talking about. “He started listing names of people, that he’s like, ‘I think we’re standing on them, you know, they’re under there.’
“And that’s what really bothered me the most, every name he mentioned, I knew (that person).”
Hobbs helped to dig through rubble for about two hours, “until security got a little stricter” and he was told to leave for his own safety. But about 15 minutes before he finally left, the first victim was brought out of the building on a stretcher.
“And that was pretty surreal because his face was down and he was kind of limp, and it was somebody you knew, so you didn’t really know what to do,” he said.
Isaac Evans, a Union freshman from Maryville, said he had gone out to take pictures of the storm before it hit. “I’d gone off chasing the storm,” he said.
And as he drove back toward campus, he saw the storm, he saw the funnel cloud, and he saw the damage being done as it happened.
“So then we just turned around and arrived on campus at the main gate, which was actually kind of gone,” he said.
Leandra Brown, a Maryville senior at Union, had just cancelled a sorority gathering when the wind started to really pick up. The terror only lasted for a few seconds, but it was intense.
“We were all huddled together,” she said. “Our ears started popping and hurting. And then it was over.”
Like the others, when Brown first looked around outside, the scene didn’t look so bad. And it stayed that way until “we started tripping over pieces of the walls,” she said.
Tiffany Best, a Maryville freshman at Union, was taking shelter with 14 other people in her dorm and one of the girls had a laptop computer that was still getting a wireless Internet signal. As the tornado passed by, the doors started shaking violently and her ears started hurting, she said. But it wasn’t until they read a news story on the Internet while huddled together in the basement that they learned there were at least eight girls trapped inside a nearby dorm that had collapsed.
“And that’s when we really started getting scared,” Brown said.
Union freshman, and Maryville resident, Amelia Satterfield, was watching a movie when the storm started kicking up. “And I really didn’t know what was going on,” she said.
A roommate with connections to Memphis — where the storm had already passed through — came in and explained the gravity of the situation.
“She was like, ‘Yeah, the mall (in Memphis) is pretty much gone.’” Satterfield said. “So I stopped the movie at that time.”
She and two roommates took shelter in the bathroom and “for 10 seconds it got really scary. Other than that, it was really silent.”
Outside, “it looked like we were in a movie, with the National Guard and policemen and firemen,” she said. “It looked like we were walking into a war zone basically.
“I was in shock, I couldn’t believe something like this could happen.”
For Amanda Hamilton, a Union senior from Maryville, at first the idea of a tornado was a bit of a joke.
“The whole day I didn’t take it seriously, because when you’re from East Tennessee, you never take tornado warnings seriously, or even hear about them,” she said. But that quickly changed.
A roommate was explaining to her what happens during a tornado, and she “was like, describing what a tornado is like when it just sucks the air out of whatever it is hitting,” Hamilton said. “Then the lights went out and that I felt that —what she was just explaining, just that loss of air, or loss of ability to breathe.
“All I remember at that point was that we were screaming prayers,” she said. “We were just continuously praying.
“And then it was over. Like 20 seconds later, it was over.
“We walked outside because we were afraid of the room caving in and there was glass everywhere and the room was just exposed to the outside,” she continued. “We walked out and there was no one there. It was quiet and there was no one there. But we did hear people yelling, and far away I think I heard people yelling for help.”
Another Blount County native, Jamie Evans, 19, Maryville, who is a sophomore at Union, was cooking dinner when he and his three roommates took shelter in their living room.
“It got really quiet, and then just all at once, here came the wind,” he said. “So we knew something was coming.”
They ran into the bathroom just as the tornado passed by.
“It seemed like it just hit and it was over,” he said. “And then it was silent again and you could hear car alarms from the other side of campus going off.”
When they ventured out of the dorm, “it looked like something had been bombed, like there was nothing (left),” he said. “It’s definitely only through God, I think, that no one died.”
And as terrible as the ordeal has been, Jamie Evans said good has come from it, with the community coming together to help the victims of the storm.
“Even something like this, as tragic as it is, I think that we still have the hope that things happen for a reason,” he said. “It’s a life-changing situation for me.
“It makes you appreciate your life and it makes you thankful in every aspect that No. 1, that you’re alive.”