"You could hear the rushing noise, and you could feel the air getting sucked out of the little area where we were," Pamela Arwady recalled.
WEST SPRINGFIELD – Pamela Arwady was shopping toward the back of the TJ Maxx store at Century Center on Memorial Drive when the storm hit at approximately 4:30 p.m.
“A woman came back running from the front of the store, yelling: ‘There’s a tornado in the parking lot. You’ve got to find shelter,’ ” Arwady recalled.
She ran, with a group of other shoppers and employees, into a steel-sided room in the back of the store.
“You could hear the rushing noise, and you could feel the air getting sucked out of the little area where we were,” she said. “I could feel it over my feet.”
Pam said the tornado appears to have come down at Court and State Street. Many of the big old trees are uprooted in the square.
Windows were blown out of many parked cars.
Some people were out taking pictures.
Many alarm systems were going off in commercial buildings.
Windows blown out of storefronts on Memorial Drive.
There was gridlock everywhere in the downtown area. Portions of Main Street were closed. Crossing the river was very difficult.
Windows were blown out of Berkshire Bank building on Columbus Avenue and out of many of the cars in the lot. One young woman was looking at her car in the bank’s parking lot, with the windows all blown out. “I just got it!” she exclaimed.