Storm story: Unscathed at first glance, cut deep on inspection

SUFFOLK

Ruth Silberholz pointed at the can of Diet 7UP on her kitchen counter Friday morning, and the one detail she hadn’t noticed until then.

“It seems like every time I come in here, I see something different,” she said.

She had just taken the soda out of the fridge and put it on the counter Monday afternoon when she looked out the back window of her Hillpoint Farms home and saw a funnel of boards, bricks and siding plowing toward her.

She turned and ran upstairs, shouting for her husband of 48 years, “Joe! Joe!”

Glass rained down the stairwell on her as pictures upstairs were blasted from the wall and windows blew out. She got to the top of the steps and saw Joe running down the hallway toward her, bleeding.

The tornado was slamming one side of their house, and shattered glass and splintered wood blasted down their second-floor hallway as though shot from a firehose. The door on the room where Joe had been on the computer tore right out of the frame.

Joe got down to Ruth’s end of the hallway, and she grabbed him by the shoulder. “Come on in here!” she said, pulling him into a guest room.

They went into an empty closet, shut the doors and waited until the noise stopped. They went downstairs, past Ruth’s blood spattered on the steps, and opened the door. They couldn’t see anything at first – their Chevy pickup had landed on its side three feet in front of their door.

Then Ruth saw.

“Joe,” she said, “this is awful.”

The house to their right on Carriage House Drive, smashed to bits. The two to their left, collapsed like houses of cards. Neighbors had to rescue a grandmother and 3-year-old girl who had been in the house next door. They had been blown into the lake behind the house.

Even Ruth and Joe’s house, the only one still standing on the cul-de-sac, had to be condemned.

They were back in the house Friday to organize and box up a few things. That’s when they figured out that even though they were on the second floor, even though they weren’t in the safest part of the house for a tornado, they had done OK.

Ruth pointed to the back of a chair, where hundreds of tiny pieces of glass were embedded. She nodded at the Diet 7UP.

“I was walking past it this morning,” Ruth said, “and I saw something and said, 'What is that?’ ”

A one-inch, arrow-shaped shard of glass had pierced the can and stuck in it.

Without making a dent.

Lon Wagner, (757) 446-2341, Lon.Wagner@pilotonline.com