We had been under a tornado warning in Amarillo. Watches and warnings are not too unusual there but when we got the warning my husband and I grabbed the kids and took them to our private business that had a basement. We waited in the basement there until the warning was called off. My husband drove the van with the kids and I followed in my smaller car to go home. About 10 blocks from home, I hit some flooding on the road that I couldn't see until I was in it. My little car started floating. I jumped out and waded to the van. We drove home and put the kids to bed. We have 5 kids, whose ages at the time were 6 months, 2 years, twins age 7, and oldest daughter age 13 years. We got all the younger kids to bed and asked our oldest to babysit while we went down the road to push my car out of the road. We figured we'd be back in about 15 minutes.
We got to my car and pushed it out of the road and heard tornado sirens going off. We rushed into the 7-11 store by my car and they said a tornado just hit our subdivision. Then the rain started pouring down. We could not drive the 10 blocks to our house because the road was now completely flooded and other cars were floating. We tried to go a different way which took us over 45 minutes to get home. We drove in from the backside of our subdivision. There were already police blockades and they weren't letting anyone in because of all the tornado damage. We frantically explained that our 5 kids were alone so they gave us a pass to go in.
The house behind us was flattened and the whole area was a mess. We ran in and found all of our kids hiding in the laundry room. My daughter had heard the tornado and grabbed the baby, told the twins to get the toddler, and they ran into the laundry room. Everyone was fine but scared. The kids were afraid that the tornado had gotten us.
Later we heard from the neighbors that they watched the tornado come right down almost on top of our house and then dipped down and got the house across the alley from us. That house was flattened to the ground. (No one was home there.) Many homes were destroyed but no one was killed or even seriously injured. Some homes had pieces of camper trailers and boats on their roofs and even a trampoline. Our trampoline was intact but our fence was destroyed. It picked up one of our bicycles, turned it around, and set it down, facing a different way with it still standing up. Very strange. I had seen dozens tornadoes while growing up in West Texas and later in the panhandle of Texas. I even watched twin tornadoes from my front yard as a teenager. When we saw tonadoes in the distance, we usually got our cameras and took pictures with no fear. I never really feared them until that day. I gained a healthy respect for tornadoes that day and realized that I could have lost all of my 5 children at once.
