Tornado!
This photo, taken Dec. 10, 1967, shows the path of a tornado through the Belaire Subdivision of Fort Walton Beach. Our house is at the bottom, slightly left of center.
I wrote this essay on March 25, 1972, which would have made me 16 years old at the time.
TORNADO!
We, being myself, my parents, my younger sister and at the time, my older sister, live in the town of Fort Walton. Fort Walton is a bustling community of about 20,000 people on Florida’s northwest Gulf Coast. Like most other communities of this day, it is threatened by the incessant pincers of commercialism, but of course, that has nothing to do with my story. Although I was only 12 at the time, I remember that morning more vividly than any other day of my life.
On December 10, 1967, at exactly 3:00 AM, I was awakened by the sound of thunder. There was a terrific thunderstorm in progress, one of the most severe I had ever experienced. There had been tornado warnings issued for our county along with several others the night before, bat at the moment, this did not even enter my mind. The lightning was incredible, it was flashing almost continuously and the thunder never halted in roaring. I lay there for 5 minutes listening to the din, when I decided to make a game of it. Using a scale between 1 and 10, I would rate each flash of lightning according to it’s intensity. If an extremely bright flash occurred, I would give it a rating of 7 or 8, and if a dim flash occurred, I would rate 2 or 3. I played this game for 10 minutes, until to my disappointment, the lightning mysteriously ended. The time was 3:15 AM. I lay back, bored once again, and listened to the steady drum of rain upon the roof. Occasionally, one enterprising raindrop would strike one of the pipes that jutted from the roof, sending a tiny “clang” down into the house. I had, by that time, decided to go back to sleep, when something terrible happened.
There was a stupendous flash of light, almost brighter than description. It would compare with confining a person to a pitch black room then suddenly setting a flashbulb off in their eyes. The light was bluer than it was white, and at first, I had thought lightning had struck the house, or either a tree out in the yard. I prepared myself for the thunder that would follow a flash of that proximity, but I was not prepared for what did follow.
A tremendous roar filled the air. Immediately I caught the sound of glass breaking and wood splintering. I kept asking myself what was happening, and I could not believe that this was our house I was hearing destroyed. By now I knew this was not thunder, and could not figure out what was happening. I sat up in bed and turned my head just in time to see a section of glass strike the wall and shatter into a thousand pieces. The terrible roar continued, nearly drowning out the rest of the sounds. The house shook as if some giant hand had grabbed it and was trying to empty it of it’s contents. Even though the curtains were drawn, my room was as bright as day. I have heard that tornadoes are often accompanied by spectacular displays of lighting; this one certainly was. This whole conglomeration of smashing, tearing and roaring took place over a period of about 15 seconds, and I still had not figured out what was going on.
Finally, the sounds grew fainter, then ceased. It grew quiet as death. The next thing I heard was the sound of my mother walking down the hall from her room, assuring me that everything was alright and not to be afraid. Personally, I am certain that she was much more afraid than I, for she would always tell us of her nightmares concerning tornadoes, she has had them years before this happened. I told her that I was alright and asked what had happened. Her reply was that a “little windstorm” had occurred, and it was then that it finally dawned upon me that we had just experienced a tornado. My father was checking on my sisters. After he had done that he retrieved the gas lantern from the utility room, while my mother and older sister started cleaning up the mess. I was not allowed to get out of bed because of the glass on the floor, and I was unable to see because of the lack of light. The lantern was with mother in my sister’s room, and my father had our only flashlight with him in the living room while he covered broken windows with cardboard.
Naturally, a child’s curiosity is the strongest, and after a minor search I discovered a section of one of my old toys that had a flashing light; as good as I could come up with in that situation. The light would stay lit for 2 seconds, then would flash off for 2 seconds, then flash on for 2 seconds. This proved to be aggravating and revealed little. After much persuasion, I managed to wheedle my parents into letting me look around. I went into the living room and stared in amazement at the damage. Almost every window in the system of small rectangular windows that made sort of a picture window were broken out. They had been covered by pieces of plywood and cardboard. Small pine branches, slivers of wood, boards and glass dotted the floor. We found one spear of wood, a wedge shaped piece about a foot long, that gone through the front window, struck the T.V. taking a gouge out of it, then had struck the dining room table and skidded across the surface leaving scratch marks on it, then had struck the dining room window and partially gone through it.
I then visited my sister’s room and saw about the same thing, broke glass, tree branches, and wood. According to my older sister, Sandy, she had been awake when the storm had struck, and looked up just in time to see the windows bulge to an amazing degree, then break.
My parents had both been awake when the storm struck. My mother jumped from her bed and tried to open the door to my sister’s room, but she couldn’t budge it, while my father tried to close one of the open bedroom windows.
After everything had been attended to inside, my father started investigating the damage outside. We had just bought a brand new boat, an aluminum 14 footer, the very day before the storm struck. According to my father who came in about 10 minutes later, it was in our neighbor’s yard against a tree. While outside he had gotten into a comical conversation with that neighbor. It ended with the neighbor saying, “Would you mind getting your boat out of my yard?”
We sat and talked of the storm among ourselves for awhile, in the meantime 2 more of our neighbors came over, each giving his own account of what had happened, and a fireman knocked on the door to see if any of us were injured. After a few more minutes of talk we went to bed. It was 4:00 AM.
Sleep was impossible. It had begun to rain again, though very lightly. During the times of 4:30 and 5:00 AM I heard another rise in the wind and thought we were due for a second performance. It continued to rise but then dropped off. Another peculiar thing happened during this time. I heard a sound similar to chimes ringing in the wind. It sounded as if small pieces of glass were falling to earth. Both my mother and I heard this sound, as we have finally come to the conclusion that it was glass returning to earth, glass that had been sucked up by the storm.
At 6:00 AM we could remain in bed no longer. I remember rising out of bed and dressing myself. This reminded me of Christmas, the contemplating of what was to be seen from those remaining windows like a child will sit and wonder what lies in those gaily decorated packages under the tree. I looked first from my bed room window. There was a large triangular section of a roof that had been stabbed into the yard off to the left. Other than minor debris I could see nothing else from this vantage point. Looking out my sister’s window that faced our next door neighbor, I could see one downed scrub oak tree. The view from my parent’s room offered the best perspective of all. From it I could see twisted trees and sections of homes from who knows where, garbage and objects from patio. But the amazing sight was the house without a roof. We had not known the extent of the damage inflicted upon the area, and we were simply amazed that this had occurred.
As soon as my father had dressed, he, my younger sister and I piled into our 1966 Fairlane, and after dodging downed powerlines we managed to get out of the stricken area and to a gas station to buy fuel for our portable heater, stove and lantern. On the way back to the house we were halted by a National Guardsman. Even after my father explained to him that we lived in the area and had to get back to our house, he still refused to let us pass. Fortunately I knew of a side road we could take, and minutes later we were home, with nothing short of a flat tire.
My mother cooked breakfast, then we all went out to inspect the damage and to proceed with the inevitable cleaning up job.
Some of the tricks the tornado pulled were really amazing and quite frightening. The boat had been latched to it’s trailer and the trailer had been chained to an 18 or more inch thick pine tree with a chain built to resist 700 lbs of pull. Of course, the boat as you know was in our neighbor’s back yard, but the amazing thing was that the chain holding the trailer ahd been snapped and the trailer was lying in the same place, upside down with at least 50 feet of telephone wire wrapped around it! We had 2 garbage sitting beside each other before the storm, but after, one had been carried off, but not before it’s contents had been emptied over the yard. A short needled pine at least 2 feet thick and been twisted 3 times at the base of the trunk and it now lay upon our roof.
These are just a few of the tricks this monster pulled on Fort Walton. A compact car was found in a tree, a man, bed and all was carried into the middle of a 4 lane highway.
Some of the grimmer aspects of the storm was the 3 year old child killed by flying debris, the scores that were injured and hundreds made homeless. The funnel touched down in a major residential area, crossed a small bayou and smashed into another residential area, then after destroying a few businesses and a major discount store of the Gibson chain, it lifted into the clouds. Debris was found more than 20 miles away.
All in all, it was the worst disaster to ever befall Fort Walton. Over 5 million dollars in damage was done, and the city was declared a disaster area by Governor Kirk.
I know that I will never forget it; the story will be told by myself and members of my family for ages to come.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
Note: I wrote the following piece when I was 16 years old.
It is an everyday Saturday morning. You have just finished drinking your coffee and reading the paper, and you are now watching a television program for a few minutes before you plan your day’s activities.
Suddenly, your program is interrupted and you see the letters EBS flash onto the television screen. Your first thought is that this is another test of the Emergency Broadcast System. A frantic announcer’s voice appears and says, “This is not a test, I repeat, this is not a test. Northern based radar stations have detected the launching of hundreds of missiles, the estimated time for their arrival is 30 minutes. I repeat, you have 30 minutes to reach safety. …”
Immediately you panic. You circle the room, terrified, completely ignorant as to what to do. You begin to calm yourself so that you can think straight. Your first decision is to reach a bomb shelter, but you have no idea as to where the nearest one is. You center your attention once again to the announcer. He seems to have calmed somewhat also, because he is now busily rattling off street names and the appropriate shelter for these streets.
You listen, and soon he announces your street along with a few neighboring streets and gives the location of their bomb shelter. You are thankful you live in a large city where adequate protection may be found. After hearing the location of your shelter, you hurriedly change your clothes, then go outside, unlatch the garage door and drive to the location.
You are greeted by a locked door. A few others are pounding piteously on it, trying to gain entrance. The shelter has been filled to capacity in minutes. You are sick to your stomach. You shake uncontrollably, and curse yourself for not preparing for this day.
A policeman advises you to go home and construct a makeshift shelter in your basement, if you have one, using heavy furniture for the shelter’s walls. Your hope in renewed.
You return to your car to only discover it has been completely encompassed by other automobiles, making it impossible to move. Forgetting about it, you begin to run home, making it in 3 minutes. You now have 20 minutes left to prepare for the attack.
You stagger into your living room, exhausted from the run, and descend into the basement to inspect the area you have in mind for the makeshift shelter.
A 6 foot long section of concrete, about 5 feet high, protrudes from the wall. It had been constructed for some unknown purpose by the previous owner of the house. You decide to use it plus your couch, two bookshelves and a chester drawers for the remaining walls.
You manage to drag the bulky couch down the stairs and arrange it to your liking, but in the process, you break off one of the legs. The remaining pieces of furniture are easier to carry down. For the roof, you use the only thing possible, a big square slab of plywood. After the shelter has been completed, you turn to gathering supplies.
To your dismay you discover there are no large containers in our house to store water in. You do manage to find a quart container that once held bleach, but the mainstay of your water supply containers are glass jars that you have been cleaned and saved for a recycling project you were part of. There are only 9 of these, and you hare forced to empty a few more jars of food that would normally require refrigeration. After you have gathered your water and hauled it to the shelter, you begin gathering food. You pick out several canned items from the shelf, along with a few containers of milk that will have to be drunk quickly lest they sour, and a few eating utensils. After this has been taken care of, you begin to gather clothes, blankets, and a first aid kit that you have previously bought for your car in case of an accident but had failed to put in the trunk.
You glance at your watch and see that you have 10 minutes left. You get one more jar of water and a few more items to eat. You are terrified, but you feel more secure.
You bend to your knees and pray to God, asking him for his help in your survival. Your prayer is interrupted by a bright flash. It is blinding, even in the center of your home where the light of day rarely falls. You dash down the stairway and enclose yourself in the shelter. Seconds later, there is a terrific thud and a wave of heat. A glass window, the only one in the basement, smashes, showering pieces on the plywood roof. Other windows break. The ground heaves as in an earthquake, causing slight structural damage to your home. It is lucky for you that you live on the outskirts of the city or the damage might have been greater. The foundation of the house shudders and several pipes are ruptured. You sit in pure terror, your heart thudding as never before. The situation you are now in has provided many an author the subject for books, and you did not even enjoy reading them, much less taking part in them. The air becomes incredibly stuffy, and one of your precious jars of water has been broken by the shock wave of the explosion.
You lay there, cramped, hot, damp from the water, you feel sick. It is pitch dark, preventing you from even making out the outline of the walls that surround you. Sleep comes hard. You wake up several times during the night. Once you hear someone prowling about the house and you wish you had a gun. Later that night you wake up and have to use the bathroom. Before the explosion occurred you had arranged a garbage can for a makeshift toilet, and even had a supply of plastic bags to store the waste in. After you finish you tightly bundle the bag with a wire twist, then you remove a drawer from the chester drawer and drop the bag in the can, then, you put the lid on and return the drawer to it’s berth. A highly efficient operation, you think, and commend yourself for your ingenuity. You again sleep till you are unable to any longer. You smell the faint odor of gas and hope that the leak does not poison you. You drink a jar of your water and open a can of mixed vegetables. You then drink the entire quart of milk that you brought along. Your legs ache, and you frequently have to rub cramps out of them. The air is constantly stuffy; you never seem to be able to get enough oxygen. As the day progresses, you become more and more bored. At first, you listen to the sounds of the outside world. Occasionally you hear the sounds of people talking, and once you hear the sounds of a savage fight between two dogs. But other than that, there is complete silence.
You eat, drink, and sit. You become so bored that you frequently daydream and resort to reading the labels on the cans. During the day, a slight amount of light managed to filter it’s way into the shelter, but as it progressed, this decreased in intensity, then disappeared.
You go through the same cycle you did the night before until the next day when the light entered the shelter. You begin exploring the perimeter of your shelter trying to discover something previously unknown. To your surprise and pleasure, you discover a book in one of the drawers. There is not enough light to read by, so you search through your belongings and produce a candle and a book of matches. You set up the candle so that it will not topple, then, taking a match from the book, you light it. There is a “puff” and your enclosure is engulfed in flame for a second. Your hair, eyelashes, nostrils and other portions of your body are burned. Thankfully the shelter did not, but you are flabbergasted by what happened. You wince in pain as you apply a sav from the first aid kit to the worst areas. You later deduce that the gases from the broken pipeline had been trapped in the shelter. You try piteously to read the book, but it is to much of a strain. Feeling sorry for yourself, you burst into tears. After a period of crying, you feel better and sleep.
You wake the next day with a fever. Later in the day you become sick to your stomach, but fight off the urge to vomit. During the night mosquitoes have completely riddled your arms and legs, but you are too sick to care. You do not eat anything that day, and you drink little. The next day you feel better, but because you did not get a tight lid for your garbage can toilet, a terrible stench has resulted. You decide that day you will come out of your shelter. You have been crammed into a tiny area for days, sick, thirsty, cramped, and near death from sheer boredom. You did not know it at the time but you had a mild case of radiation sickness. You eat, use the bathroom, and remove one of the drawers so you may have light to read your book by. When it gets dark, you drink the last container of water, and are able to finally get a decent night of sleep. The next morning you awaken to find yourself totally soaked, and a thin layer of water covering the floor. Somewhere, a water pipe had broken and water was draining into the basement. You rise and unbarricade yourself. It feels wonderful to stretch your weary self. A bright beam of sunshine streaks through the broken window, displaying the cracked woodwork above your head.
You ascend the stairs and explore the house. The water is coming from the kitchen. A broken pipe juts through the floor amid broken glass. In fact, every window in your house is broken. The house across the street has completely burned to the ground. Down the street you can see a camp with many tents and a Red Cross truck parked nearby.
You find the gas valve and shut it off, take a drink of water that remains in the pipes, then change your filthy clothes, and leave your house to see what has become of the world.
This has been a story of what could happen to anyone in a time of nuclear war. The person in the story was extremely lucky in surviving.
What did he (or she) do wrong?
The first thing was that she panicked. No mater how hard it may seem, you must stay calm in a situation like this. One cannot think clearly if in a panic.
The worst thing she did was not planning ahead. She did not know where the bomb shelter was among a multitude of other things. You should know the location of the nearest bomb shelter to your home. In the story, when she did discover the shelter’s whereabouts, she took no supplies with her, and she drove to it. Bomb shelters are limited in the amounts and types of supplies they can carry. You should take clothing and any other materials needed for your family. You should not drive unless you can park somewhere out of the way. The roads should be left open for emergency and military vehicles.
If you do not think you could reach a public shelter, construct one of your own in your basement or back yard. A temporary shelter can be constructed out of heavy furniture such as the one in the story. It would be best to take advantage of any shielding you can possibly find. If you happen to have a piece of furniture in your temporary shelter with drawers in them fill them with sand. Be sure that your shelter is well ventilated.
You should have several plastic gallon containers handy for the storage of water.
You should also have food that can be kept over long periods of time without spoiling. Items such as clothes, blankets, utensils and medical supplies are also very important. You should make sure your utilities are shut off (gas and water), because like in the story, a pipe could be broken and you could be poisoned or catch some diseases from water that has flooded your shelter.
A makeshift toilet can be made from a garbage can. Small portable toilets can be bought, the garbage can is used for disposal. Make sure the lid fits tight or you could wind up like the person in the story. You should also carry some type of insect spray.
There are hundreds of other suggestions I could give you, but probably the most important is to acquire a Civil Defense manual. In this book, everything you would like and need to know is covered and written simple enough for nearly anyone to understand.
It could, some day, save not only your, but your family’s life.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .