San Antonio residents describe tornado chaos

From shaking windows to downed trees to toppled children’s playthings and barbecue pits flung across yards, a tornado, which briefly touched the lives of several residents near Fort Same Houston, left residents in awe and assessing the damage done. It’s relatively uncommon for a tornado to actually make contact in San Antonio, but Thursday morning, October 26, one did just that, and it had local residents clamoring to the streets comparing stories and analyzing the damage.

A tornado touched down for roughly a minute Thursday morning, according to estimates from residents in the affected area, on a set of sleepy residential streets just outside of Fort Sam Houston on the near Eastside of San Antonio. A quick drive around the once-quiet street shown neighbors huddling together amid downed powerlines, fallen limps, and trees split in half at the trunk.

The Jones family gathered outside a family dwelling on Benton Street shortly after the whirlwind hit their home, tossing a foldable table and barbecue pit across the yard and severely damaging a children’s trampoline.

“All the windows and everything was just shaking and blowing like crazy,” one family member said, opting not to share her name. “The walls here are kind of thin, and everything was just like shaking and blowing around.”

The family pointed to neighbors yards where sheds were overturned and a front porch statue was toppled over, losing its head to the fall. While the family only had their experiences to share from inside the rattling walls of their home, their four dogs were left outside initially to weather the storm from the yard – until their mom let them in just this once.

“My mom, when we heard the noise, my mom opened the door, and they [the dogs] were all crying and running and scratching at the door.”

Conrad Calderon, who lives around the corner from the Jones family on Mason Street, was watching the news forecast of the tornado as it ripped apart his neighborhood street. He described a rather violent scene of toppled limbs and dancing roof shingles – something he said he’d only ever seen in movies.

“We had it on TV, and we were watching the tornado blow through, blowing everybody’s chairs away – all our patio furniture on the porch. All the shingles were going like this like some kind of Halloween show,” Calderon told MySA, gesturing the flopping motion the shingles made on rooftops across his street. “Everything was going sideways – the wind and the rain.”

Richard Fernandez, a neighbor of Calderon, was at work when he got a frantic call from his wife telling him to get home. The tornado had ripped a tree in half, perfectly splitting half its trunk on his house and the other half on the roof of his neighbor’s home.

“I was at work, and my wife called me and she said that a tornado had hit near here,” Fernandez recalled. “I came home quickly. I was freaked out when my wife told me. I was worried about the dogs and the house. I didn’t know how much damage there was. But I came home, and I said, “Whoa,” as I saw the leaves on the street. It was weird.”

As neighbors continued to meet in small clusters all around the neighborhood streets, joined by more as the rain died down and the weather calmed, city trucks made their way through the area, pulling up fallen limbs and downed trees which littered just about every street of the neighborhood.