![]() ![]() “We were hanging on to each other for dear life.” “We had our faces buried in each other,” Amanda said. Next thing you know, it was upside down and rolling,” Brandon said.ĭécor became debris as everything in the house – including them – tumbled wildly inside the pitch-black rolling drum their home had become. “I mean, it blew off.”Īmanda slammed the door shut, the lights went out and she and Brandon dropped to the living room floor, holding each other as tightly as they could. “As soon as she opened the door, that whole front porch, a 12-by-12-foot covered deck, was just gone,” Brandon said. Hanging on 'for dear life'īack at the Gall home, Amanda opened the door to leave and suddenly, the porch wasn’t there anymore. Tina squeezed in, and then the tornado was upon them. When she arrived, everyone already was hiding-out in the bathtub. Tina immediately swept up her pets, put them in her car, and drove the one hundred yards or so down the dirt road to Kenneth and Kendra Gabriel’s home, an older, sturdier wood frame home built on a cement slab foundation. “You might want to go down to your daughter’s house,” she advised her. Knowing she also lived in a manufactured home, Holly Hunter had seen the tornado warning on television there and called to check on her sister. “I said, ‘Let’s get the dogs and get out of here!’”Ī half-mile to the west, Tina Hoffman had bedded down for the night when she received a phone call from Coleman. “It wasn't a few minutes later that we were in a tornado warning,” Brandon recalled. Just after 9:40 p.m., the situation went from bad to worse. Heeding the alert, the couple gathered their dogs and went into the house. Then a second storm came in from the south and a severe thunderstorm warning was issued. Based on the radar track, it looked like it was going to keep heading east and miss them. Sitting outside their manufactured home Tuesday night, Brandon and Amanda had been watching the weather build near Stamford to the north. Now, with skies clearing, they and their neighbors were left wondering how to rebuild their lives. The fact that the couple was here at all, 14 hours after a tornado had picked up their home with them in it, was a testament to their resilience. The handful of cattle and horses had been rounded up by neighbors earlier in the day, and the animals tore into the feed as Brandon backed the tractor away. Trying to ignore his own 14 stitches, several lacing his back and shoulder, and his twisted knee, Brandon cut the mesh holding the round hay bale he’d suspended over their small livestock pen. Nearby, his wife, Amanda, sat in their pickup, one hand in a brace and stitches in her arm and in her scalp, hidden from view. ANSON – Brandon Gall limped from his tractor Wednesday as a light rain began to fall on the remains of his small homestead in rural Jones County. ![]()
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