When senior meteorology major Rob Hart, a resident of the southern Indiana area devastated by a Sunday morning tornado, returned to his Starkville apartment Saturday night, he looked at the radar.
“I was watching a line of storms come across, and then I realized they were becoming tornadic,” he said.
He began calling family and friends to wake them up, telling them to go to the basement. At one point, he couldn’t get through to anyone and thought the power lines must have gone out.
“About 3:30 or 4 in the morning, I started getting calls that everything wasn’t OK, people were dying,” he said.
The tornado, which killed 22 people and injured over 200 others, had hit around 2 a.m. The storm had winds of over 158 mph.
Hart described his hometown of Boonville, Ind., as the heart and largest city of Warrick County and the second-largest city in the region next to Evansville, which is about 15 miles away. Not only the town but the whole county is close-knit, he said.
“Everybody in the town knows somebody whose home was destroyed,” he said.
The tornado killed five people in Warrick County, an Associated Press article said.
“Having something like that hit your home town and home area, it helps you to understand the way weather is,” Hart said. He said he found his field of study ironic given the situation.
Freshman marketing major Trey Grimme, who is from nearby Evansville, Ind., said he feels lucky the tornado didn’t hit the part of town where his family lives. “My family is on the left side of Evansville. I’m just really lucky it didn’t touch down on the left side,” he said.
Evansville, the largest city in the area, is in Vanderburgh County, where at least 17 people were killed in the Eastbook Mobile Home Park, Vanderburgh County Sheriff Brad Ellsworth told The Associated Press.
Hart’s family also came through unharmed, but one of his friends, a senior in high school, died in the tornado, and her father died at the hospital later, he said.
Nobody Grimme knows was killed, but he said he knows one person who no longer has a house.
Hart said he was not surprised that a tornado hit the area because tornados occur there frequently during this time of year. “I was more surprised with the strength of the tornado,” he said.
He said he wanted to go home this week but was not able to make it.
“When I do go home, which will be Thanksgiving, things are going to be different,” he said.