SYCAMORE – A Liberty County High School student dove into a closet with his parents just seconds before a huge limb tore through his bedroom ceiling as a tornado made its way through the panhandle Monday morning.
Jack McClellan, 17, and his parents, Mark and Melanie, live just inside the Gadsden County limits in the Sycamore community, where the tornado left a trail of destruction.
“I woke up about five minutes before it happened,” he said. The LCHS Junior was in bed, listening to loud, heavy thunder overhead. His father was drinking coffee on the front porch when he got a tornado alert on his cell phone around 6 a.m.
“My mom was still sleeping. My dad ran in, yelling and woke me up,” Jack said. His father told them to get in the closet of Jack’s room.
Seconds after the three of them huddled in the small closet, they heard the limb crashing through the ceiling of their wood frame home. Then the thunder and wind ceased and everything was quiet.
They emerged to find that two sections of the limb, which hit at an angle, had punctured the ceiling. One part of the limb also went into the wall, tearing through a poster. Jack estimated the size of the larger hole in the roof to be between three to four feet in diameter.
“I would have been hit by the debris if I’d been in bed,” he said. “It was all over in about 30 seconds.”
The McClellans live on a small lake off Old Church Road near Greensboro. “The tornado pretty much whipped right around us,” Jack said, explaining, “It did a semi-circle around our house.”
He said, “ A lot of our neighbors got hit pretty hard. It obliterated the trees in one neighbor’s yard.”
Their vehicles were also damaged. The car he uses to drive to Bristol for school was left with a big dent in the roof and a shattered windshield. A boat and trailer parked under a shed was moved about four feet.
Barely 30 minutes after the tornado passed through, neighbors were out checking on one another. “So many people came up and helped us,” he said. Their yard was filled with fallen limbs and trees.
As he ran to his small closet, Jack said he looked for two things: his camera and his cat. He found the camera. The cat was nowhere to be seen. Later in the day, the cat was discovered hiding under the house, safe and sound although he was “wide-eyed and pretty spooked.”
Along with the debris cleanup, his mom has another task on his to-do list: Clean out his crowded closet. “The next time there’s a tornado, we need to actually get in the closet,” his mom told him.