Suffolk mayor's message: 'We are in control'

SUFFOLK

Before the winds came, Delores Detwiler was comfortably at work.

As a cold front began to aggravate warm and humid air, Cheryl Mills got ready to run over to the vet's office to pick up her pet.

While thunderstorms roiled up, Elaine Hall and Sandy Peterson hooked up IV lines for cancer patients.

As a super cell crossed from North Carolina into Virginia, the Driver Furry Friends gathered six foster kittens and four cats at the Harmony House Antiques store for a photo shoot.

Around 4 p.m., the elements came together. Hell dropped out of the sky right on top of them.

A phone rang at Harmony House. A tornado is headed your way, the caller said. Be careful.

Ellisse Parker took the warning with a grain of salt. She was in downtown Driver, on the Virginia Coastal Plain - hardly a notorious location for twisters.

But the wind picked up. Then she heard what sounded like a train.

"That's a tornado!" she exclaimed, and the four women ran for the bathroom in the rear of the store. Three of them made it.

Kerry Greene, the nurse manager of Sentara Obici Hospital's emergency room, was at home laminating a cut-out of Florence Nightingale when she saw the funnel cloud. It was mesmerizing, but she ran to a closet, realizing along the way that her son was still at Obici's day care center.

In the day care hallway, teachers shielded children with their bodies, as the wind began to whistle like a locomotive.

Mills' son, 12-year-old Keoni Naki, didn't want to go to the vet with his mom. He flipped on MTV. The sky turned black, and debris began to fly past the windows. The Driver Variety Store collapsed to the ground. Frightened, Keoni bolted out the door to run to his grandmother's house.

At the Virginia Oncology Treatment Center, five patients were hooked up to chemotherapy IVs when a staff member yelled, "There's a tornado! I see it!" Peterson tried to pull one woman to her feet, but she couldn't walk. The husband pulled, too. Then the windows exploded.

Richard Hendricks, assistant chief of the Driver Volunteer Fire Department, was paged at work. Tornado warning.

Driving down Nansemond Parkway, he saw the black funnel cloud. "God," he said to himself. "No, no." He drove as close to town as he could, around trees and power lines dropped across the roads. He saw the remains of the Harmony House, the Variety Store, the metal roofs curled up on other buildings, the Knot Hole Station's storage building burst open.

"Oh, my God," Hendricks thought.

In three minutes or less, it was over. Houses were gone, from neighborhoods around Obici to the small community of Driver, some six miles away. Restaurants and medical offices and small businesses were destroyed. Furious winds of 160 mph had come and gone in less time than it takes to boil eggs.

The three Furry Friends forced the bathroom door open, pushing antiques aside, screaming the name of their missing colleague. The cages were empty, the cats gone. Parker turned to look at her house, and saw the entire front fallen off. She ran to look for her son.

Elevators had quit working at the third-floor oncology office. Patients and staff were helped out by the fire department, only to find themselves stranded again. Their cars had been bent and broken and piled in mounds.

Mills dashed back to Driver in pouring rain, to find her son shaken and her mother's legs cut by glass that blew out of her car windows.

Detwiler had heard nothing of bad weather, so she was surprised when her daughter called from Indiana, where she was watching TV news.

"What's in the side of the house?" she asked, and her mother left work to go find out.

Soon, police cars blocked all roads into Driver, and officers tried to evacuate residents. Some refused to leave. Others were refused back in.

"You can't go any farther," a policeman told Jan Hawkins around 7:30 p.m.

"My animals are in there!" she said. "I'm going to my house!" She held the leashes of two white standard poodles, their toenails polished blue. A dog and three cats were still in the house.

"My house is fine!" she insisted. "I saw it on TV!"

He still said no.

Night fell as hopeful tree cutters walked around passing out business cards, and electrical workers put on hard hats, and gawkers drove slowly past. The communities of Driver, around since Colonial times, and those of Burnett s Mill and Hillpoint Farms, of more modern vintage, were changed forever.

Shortly after sunrise Tuesday, Mayor Linda Johnson stepped before TV cameras and asked the public for patience and understanding.

"The message this morning is, 'We are in control,' " she said. With the destroyed Freedom Plaza shopping center in the background, she told local and national media that the city would recover.

"It's pretty difficult not to cry," she said. "I've lived here for 44 years and never seen anything like this."

The Berea Christian Church, one lot removed from Driver's worst damage, provided free pancakes and coffee for all takers.

In Wakefield, officials from the National Weather Service waited for a lift from the Civil Air Patrol, so they could assess the damage and assign it a number. EF-3 maybe: "Severe damage." EF-4 perhaps: "Devastating damage."

Near Obici, because all the roads were blocked, James Wright and his daughter walked in to see what was left of the area where they attend church.

"That building right there," Wright said, pointing to a smashed one, "just finished about a month ago."

"And that pizza place just opened," said his daughter, Roxanne Holland, following his gesture. "Oh my gosh! You can see right through the pizza place."

Half a dozen cars lay spiked to the ground, and past that the beams and skeleton of Freedom Plaza, and past that another parking lot of even more smashed cars. In the other direction, severed pines revealed the twister's path, which somehow plowed across busy highways in late afternoon and killed no one.

The Furry Friends took stock. The kittens had been found, one by one, the last one turning up at 1:30 in the morning. The adult cats were all missing, including Isabelle, the store cat, and Whiskers, the pet of Ellisse Parker.

Vicki Weight paced in the street. She had not been with the Friends when the storm went through.

"I almost wish I had been here," she said. "Maybe I could have grabbed another cat. You always think you could do something, if only you were there."

The Friends need cat food, litter, cages and linens. They need foster homes, now that so many of theirs are gone. They need people to keep an eye out for the missing cats: an orange tabby, a black-and-white male, a tabby-and-white nursing female, a blackish-gray girl with a blue rhinestone collar.

"I have faith in God," Weight said, "that he will take care of his animals," and she wiped her eyes.

Detwiler came home to find a metal beam piercing the bedroom wall of her brick house. Her American flag was in a tree.

"It was hanging upside down," she said, "like a distress signal."

Her outside table was smashed, the bedding plants on it vanished. But a ceramic Santa that had been sitting on the table was somehow unscratched, found perched on a chair pillow on the floor.

Small airplanes and helicopters began to circle Suffolk. The governor came to look. Weather experts came to look. Residents came to look and could not believe their eyes.

Ruth Silberholz and her husband found the sunroom of their Hillpoint Farms home stripped to the frame, full of wet leaves and dirt. The ceiling and walls were damaged, the furniture gone. When they stepped outside, they realized how lucky they were.

The house next door: "Totally disappeared," she said. "There was no home there at all." Three other homes in their cul-de-sac were still there, in theory, but collapsed to the ground.

As the cleanup slowly progressed, firemen began going into stores and removing computers, money and documents for Driver's anxious proprietors. Word began to spread that 300 state troopers would arrive by nightfall to stand guard on the dark, empty streets.

Holly Hoffler checked on two buildings she owns at the main intersection. Her brother's store across the street was damaged, their brother's variety store destroyed.

"Greg lost his home, and Craig's store is gone," she said, as afternoon began to fall away. "We'll rebuild. We will. We've been here for six generations."

Already, a fundraiser has been planned for the town on June 8, to take place in the field where Harmony House will no longer stand, where the cats remain missing. It will have music and a pig pickin' and a "motorcycle poker run."

"It's comforting," Hoffler said. "You've got to do something. I mean, you can't do anything, so you might as well plan ahead."

Traffic skirted Driver and clogged up around King's Fork and Elephant's Fork and Godwin Boulevard. Cars were directed onto dead-end Meade Parkway, where they had to turn and creep out again.

Pedestrians came by. A young girl pointed to a tree bent in half.

"Mama! Look at that tree! Did a lot of people die?"

"Come on, baby," the mom said. "Let's go back."

And they walked away from the places where there is no going back.

Staff writers Nancy Young, Lon Wagner, Dave Forster, Kristin Davis, Hattie Brown Garrow, Linda McNatt and Denise Watson Batts contributed to this report.

Diane Tennant, (757) 446-2478, diane.tennant@pilotonline.com