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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
Now, with skies clearing, they and their neighbors were left wondering how to rebuild their lives.
An ominous beginning
Sitting outside their manufactured home Tuesday night, Brandon and Amanda had been watching the weather build near Stamford to the north. Based on the radar track, it looked like it was going to keep heading east and miss them.
Then a second storm came in from the south and a severe thunderstorm warning was issued. Heeding the alert, the couple gathered their dogs and went into the house.
Just after 9:40 p.m., the situation went from bad to worse.
“It wasn't a few minutes later that we were in a tornado warning,” Brandon recalled. “I said, ‘Let’s get the dogs and get out of here!’”
A sister's call
A half-mile to the west, Tina Hoffman had bedded down for the night when she received a phone call from Coleman. 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.
“You might want to go down to your daughter’s house,” she advised her. 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.
When she arrived, everyone already was hiding-out in the bathtub. Tina squeezed in, and then the tornado was upon them.
Hanging on 'for dear life'
Back at the Gall home, Amanda opened the door to leave and suddenly, the porch wasn’t there anymore.
“As soon as she opened the door, that whole front porch, a 12-by-12-foot covered deck, was just gone,” Brandon said. “I mean, it blew off.”
Amanda 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.
“The whole house started shaking. Next thing you know, it was upside down and rolling,” Brandon said.
Décor became debris as everything in the house – including them – tumbled wildly inside the pitch-black rolling drum their home had become.
“We had our faces buried in each other,” Amanda said. “We were hanging on to each other for dear life.”
She opened her mouth, gasping for a breath, and it instantly filled with papery bits of insulation as the walls around them split open, the swirling air thick with the material. She tried to spit it out but the insulation kept flying into her mouth and she inadvertently swallowed some as the home continued to tumble.
The house fell apart as it entered their nearby pond and the couple pulled each other out of the water. Surrounding them were the jagged remains of their home, hidden by darkness as rain and hail now pelted them.
Brothers in blue
Brandon, a Taylor County Sheriff’s Office deputy, still had in his pocket the key fob for his patrol Tahoe parked by the fence. He dug it out as they struggled to get clear of the wreckage.
“I kept pushing the button for the lights to come on so we could see, because we had no clue where we were at,” he said.
Neither had their cellphones, only the clothes on their backs. There was no sign of their two dogs and two cats.
Once they reached his vehicle, Brandon radioed the Taylor County dispatcher that they needed help. Not knowing if the tornado still was around, he made his best guess as to the storm’s heading and then drove them in the opposite direction, until they were met by a Jones County deputy who brought them to Anson General Hospital for treatment.
“Of course, all the Taylor County guys, and the Jones County guys, came running,” Brandon said. “My brothers in blue were there for me. I mean, that was the biggest thing.”
One home battered, another far worse
When the tornado hit the Gabriels’ home, it pulled a 25-foot mulberry tree from the ground, while snapping 7 inch-thick limbs on numerous nearby mesquites too stubborn to uproot. A portion of the roof had been yanked into the sky and a covered porch mud room was wrenched from the back of the house.
In the driveway, car windows were smashed by debris and the covering for their greenhouse was threaded high in the trees. But it was the remains of Hoffman’s home which were most despairing.
Mary Pritchard, another sister who had come to help, described the scene.
“They came down here to look at the damage and (the tornado) had flipped her house and completely destroyed it,” she said.
A confirmed twister
Mike Castillo, a warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in San Angelo, arrived Wednesday morning with a small team to assess the damage.
Based on the damage and the debris, he confirmed it to be a tornado and not straight-line winds.
“Preliminarily, we're thinking an EF-2 tornado,” he said. “That’s anywhere from 100 to about 140 miles per hour. It depends if it's a weak EF-2 or a strong EF-2. So that's what we're coming out here to determine, how strong the winds were.”
The weather service measures tornadoes using the Enhanced Fujita Scale of 0-5. The May 18, 2019, tornado that struck Abilene was rated EF-2.
The path of the twister, rather than plowing a straight line through the countryside, appeared to have hopped instead. Castillo said that was indicated by how it seemed to have passed some structures only to take out others just yards away.
The tornado warning issued by the weather service was brief. It was to expire at 10 p.m., and did because the storm had dissipated.
But it had done its damage in rural Jones Count7.
Aside from the three homes, nearby sheds were also destroyed. Another house to the west also appeared to have sustained damage to the roof, but no one was home during the day.
'Worst roller coaster'
Amanda Gall was gingerly stepping through the debris, wearing flip-flops as her husband sat in a recovered recliner he had propped up in the spot where his home used to be. Family members laughed at the sight as they pulled up cinderblocks and mud-covered folding chairs to join him.
“You’ve gotta laugh, otherwise you’ll cry,” Brandon said.
There was some good news. The dogs had been found and the cats located, though one still refused to come out from beneath the rubble.
In particular, Brandy, the couple’s springer spaniel, was bounding in and out of the pond, apparently having fully recovered from the ditch where a neighbor had found her earlier that day, shivering. Now she was happily paddling up to the walls and debris resting in the water. She appeared to be chasing frogs but no one was sure.
The sun was out now, the air turning sultry as the sky burned blue. Brandon leaned back, sipped a beer and took a call from the Red Cross.
The house had been restrained by hurricane straps tied to four-foot or longer anchors screwed deep into the earth, all of it designed to hold the house down in the event of a storm like this one. But all four at each corner had been ripped out by the tornado.
“The worst roller coaster at Six Flags, that's for sure,” he’d said earlier, laughing slightly as he tried to wrap his mind around the previous night. “I don't know how to really describe it. Everything in the house was just piling on top of us, it was horrible.”
Brandon’s cousin started a GoFundMe account for them. He’s grateful, but the next step is hard to see.
“I don't know what we're gonna do, I don't even know how we're going to clean this up,” he said. “I've never been in a situation like this.”
Only the pond was original to their homestead, the rest they did themselves.
“We bought this land, there was nothing; no house, no water, no electric, nothing. We built it up from Ground Zero,” he said, then took a deep breath.
“Now it ain't nothing.”
