The Jarrell Tornado

    The date was Tuesday, May 27th, 1997
    The day dawned clear and sunny. Mom and I were planning to go shopping at Wal-Mart; I was thinking about that and forgot to check the online weather forecasts (which included thunderstorm risk areas). I had been in a habit of looking at those forecasts every day, since May is the prime severe weather month in our area. Since there were no clouds and the day looked to be a hot dry one, I didn’t think of checking the weather.
   

    Mom and I went into Wal-Mart and stayed for awhile. We decided to leave about 3:40pm (I’m not sure of the exact time, I’m only guessing, due to what time the tornado hit Jarrell) so we went to a checkout counter that happened to be adjacent to one of the sets of double doors that led into the store.
   

    I looked out the doors from where I was standing and was surprised to see that it looked like the sun had gone down for the evening! I checked my watch to make sure it wasn’t later than I thought it was, and it was early enough that the sun should still be pretty high in the sky. I exclaimed to Mom that it looked dark, and she said, well, maybe it’s going to rain! I walked over to the doors and saw that the sky was completely dark except for a bit of sunlight coming from the southwest sky. It looked awful! It really scared me, so I ran back to Mom and said that it was almost dark outside! As I said those words, it thundered for the first time, and it was loud enough we could hear it inside the store! I said to Mom, let’s get home quick, I don’t like this!

    We grabbed our groceries and ran out the doors to our car, about halfway to our car, it started raining these big, cold drops. We got in the car and turned out of the parking lot and onto the service road to go towards home. As soon as we got down to the traffic light down by the overpass of the interstate, it started to hail!

    The hail wasn’t big enough to do damage to the car….yet, but I told Mom we should sit under the interstate until the hail stopped, so it wouldn’t dent our car if the hail got bigger.

    *(see note below) We pulled onto a road that went under the highway and we drove the car over the curb and up onto the grass. We turned on the radio and heard the alarm tones going off constantly, interspersed with reports from the weather people. They said a tornado had been sighted near Cedar Park, a town several miles west of us. Then they had people calling in from various parts of the cities (Round Rock, Cedar Park and Austin) saying they had seen a funnel cloud, etc.

    It started raining a lot harder right after we got under the road, and then the wind started blowing! People were driving up under the bridge alongside us. The lightning became constant, making listening to the radio impossible, due to the electrical interferance, but in between the "crashes" on the radio, we could hear what people were saying, and this one man called in and said he was up by Hobby Lobby ( that was less than a mile north of us, up the road) and he saw a funnel cloud touch down in the parking lot!! That really scared us to hear that there was a tornado so close! As we were looking towards the northeast, we saw the lightning hit a transformer about a mile away from us. It sparked and made a big blue glow before disappearing. Shortly after we heard the funnel report, the wind started blowing very hard from the northeast, slapping rain against the windshield so hard that we couldn’t even see out of it! It kept blowing steadily harder and harder, and our suburban began rocking back & forth from front to back (not side to side!). Mom got out a bunch of blankets and climbed in the back seat to be away from the airbag in the steering wheel, in case something hit the front of the car and made it go off. She handed me a couple of blankets and said, "if the car rolls over, get on the floor and put these over your head!". Well, that really scared me! I was praying very hard that nobody would get hurt, and after about a minute or so, of the wind blowing (I estimated the wind was blowing about 75-80 mph!!) it stopped.

    I had seen a tornado video of some people who had to seek shelter under an overpass on Wichita, KS, and the video showed what happened when the tornado went over them. The same thing, with the wind blowing harder and harder, and then suddenly stopping, happened here, so I guessed that a funnel cloud, not touching the ground, had gone directly over us!! This storm was obviously a very bad one, not like any storm I had ever been in before!

    We kept listening to the radio and getting more reports from weather people and people calling in to the radio station, and heard that a tornado had hit the Albertsons grocery store in Cedar Park. We have friends there, so we were praying for them not be hurt. Pretty soon, the wind started blowing again, and I think this was due to another funnel cloud passing over us. The winds gusted again to around 70-80 mph, and we got ready to get on the floor of the car if needed, but thankfully, we never did! The winds quickly stopped again and it just rained.

    After about 2 hours of sitting under the overpass, the rain finally slowed down to where you could see through it (!) and people began leaving. The sky started getting lighter, so we decided to leave too. I should say that we tried to leave……when it rained so hard, the "solid" dirt we were sitting on, turned to mud, about 4 inches deep! We tried to get the car to move, but to no avail. Another man was stuck too.

    Finally some teenagers drove by and helped him and us out with a tow rope. After getting back on the road, we drove home, hoping everything was intact there. Everything was fine, except for a medium-size tree branch laying by the porch, but that was all!

    We went in and turned on the TV and found out that a huge tornado had hit Jarrell, TX, and killed 28 people! Another two tornadoes had hit Cedar Park, and killed one person.

    Turns out, our friends who live there, saw the tornado coming, so the Mom got under a mattress in the bathtub with her three little kids, while the Grandpa stood outside videotaping (By the way, I do NOT recommend videotaping a tornado from your front yard if it’s coming towards you!!)
Anyway, our friends were safe, but there was a lot of damage in a neighborhood about 2 miles from them. One person was killed there.

    The only very major damage near us was a tree down the street had been tilted over to rest on the edge of the roof of the house, whose yard it grew in, but no one there was hurt and I don’t even think the roof had any damage!
The other damage was down at Hobby Lobby, where the man had reported from earlier. They got part of their roof torn off and some of it was flung over the parking lot, and our favorite barbecue restaurant (in the same shopping center as Hobby Lobby, about 3 stores down) got a window broken out of it when the funnel passed, but everyone inside was ok. (We went in there for supper and asked if they knew about the funnel cloud coming through the parking lot, and they said "What? We didn't see anything!" They said no one saw anything but the wind blew really hard and then the glass broke out!)

   That is the TRUE story of my experience in the Jarrell storm/tornado of 1997!
        -Elisabeth

    *(Note) I have since read and been told that the practice of seeking shelter under an overpass can be extremely dangerous in a tornado. The reason for this is that the winds naturally blow harder through small spaces. The most dangerous aspect of a tornado is the debris, and the stronger the wind, the more debris will be lodging itself in your body! It's best to be underground or in an interior room when a tornado approaches!