At the MassMutual Center, shaken and weeping adults arrived with babies in strollers, wailing children clinging to their legs and whatever belongings they could salvage in plastic bags. Watch video
SPRINGFIELD – Sandra E. Blaney saw the trees on Bliss Street bending in the wind and thinking to herself: Those trees are pretty old. There is no way they could break.”
Blaney had just moved to Northampton from New York City. She’s had her new job at Johnson and Hill Staffing for less than a month. She’s only had her 2011 Subaru a few weeks.
And now she was stuck in traffic with a funnel cloud bearing down her.
“I closed my eyes,” she said. “I didn’t want to see what was going to happen.”
But she felt the car windows break inward. She felt the shards of broken glass hit her arms and neck. When she opened her eyes, the parking lot seemed a wasteland, she said. Cars were destroyed. Trees down. Bricks from nearby buildings littered the ground.
Blaney said she saw injured people. She was unhurt.
“I’m just shaken up. Shaking like a leaf,” she said.
She’d just started a job in Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001.
“This reminded me of that terrible day,” she said.
Further south, the area around Howard Street was transformed into a war zone, with bricks form the heavily-damaged South End Community Center littering the ground. Parents screamed for their children. Workers at Red Rose Pizza loaded as much food as they could into their cars and fled their damaged building.
Police told people who couldn’t move their cars to take all their valuables and any documents with their names and addresses. Police feared looting.
When word spread that more storms were coming, people fled north on Main Street. A father shouted “Andale! Arriba! Arriba!” as he herded his family into a minivan.
A few blocks away at the MassMutual Center , shaken and weeping adults arrived with babies in strollers, wailing children clinging to their legs and whatever belongings they could salvage in plastic bags.
“I just made it to my basement before it hit,” said a wobbly Jenny Torres, whose young daughter clung to her knees and sobbed.
Torres said she, her three children and dogs were safe, but her home at 96 Central Street was destroyed.
“The winds tore a hole in the foundation and the windows and roof are gone,” she said, before taking cover in the entertainment venue on Main Street.
Evacuees from the city’s hard hit South End neighborhood were directed there shortly after the first touch-down. The first to arrive was a busload of toddlers and preschoolers from a downtown day care center damaged during the tornado.
Hundreds rested on folding chairs in a large exhibit hall with a concrete floor while the Minnechaug Regional High School senior prom got into full swing on the second level.
At South Congregational Church, 45 Maple St., Springfield, a few dozen people took shelter in the basement. Harry Lofland, 55, of 323 Central St., Springfield, said, “It took the roof right off of my building. I live on the fourth floor. Now I’ve got nothing.” Louis Kornet was in Court Square as the second tornado hit. He’d watched the first storm from his office on the 16th and uppermost floor of One Financial Plaza on Court Square. He and his colleagues watched the clouds form and start to swirl high over West Springfield.
“It was like watching a television show,” Kornet said. “You only see these things in movies.”
Adam E. Formus of Enfield was also working on the 16th floor. He said and his coworkers were transfixed by the gathering storm, he said.
“Then there were people in the hallway screaming at us to get in the stairwell in the center of the building,” Formus said.
Once there, he knew the storm had passed because his ears popped.
“You could feel the pressure change,” he said. “It was like riding up in an elevator.”
Next thing he knew, he was being evacuated down the stairs and out the door.
Another worker in One Financial Plaza saw boards and debris swirling in the storm cloud.
“It sounded like a freight train,” she said. “It was moving so fast. It just came down on us.”
Debris hit the 13th floor of One Financial Plaza where Martha G. Waldron was working.
“We saw the dark clouds and we saw how the river was so turbulent, and then all of a sudden, you saw debris flying at our level and you could see a dark funnel cloud,” said Waldron, critical quality improvement coordinator with BMC HealthNet Plan.
“It was just a weird experience,” she said.
The weather showed its surprising power in another way, she said, recounting how the energy of the funnel cloud seemed to lift part of the Connecticut River, visible from her office. “It looked almost like the water was coming up,” Waldron said.
Springfield resident Mirna Colón was getting her hair done at a downtown hair salon when what she described as dark cloud began covering the sky.
“I saw a dark cloud and then what looked as a tornado, a lot of wind with garbage,” said Colon.
Victor Melendez, of Springfield tied to help.
“I may be 71 years old but I am agile and have gone through similar things in hurricanes,” said Melendez, native of Puerto Rico. In Wilbraham, Rebecca Lamb said she was working in the Village Store when a neighbor told her they saw the tornado in the sky.
“We had a lot of Wilbraham & Monson Academy kids in here,” she said. “The basement is not set up for tornadoes. She said she told the students to run back to school.
Lamb said one of the Village Store employees went back to her home at the corner of Main Street and Tinkham Road in Wilbraham and found that the house was missing rooms and the garage.
Emergency workers have been responding from Ludlow and Bondsville, Lamb said. “It’s good to see our neighbors coming here.”
Carol Teixeira Dragon, vice president of operations at the Mansfield Paper Co. on Union Street in West Springfield said, “There were things literally blowing through the building.” She said she “looked outside and there were trees swaying and blowing over on top of cars, and wall panels flew off the top of the building.”
Ross Rodgers, of 61 Pontoosic Road in Westfield sent his wife Theresa and their grandson to the basement then watched the funnel pass overhead. “It blew out a window in the bathroom and brought down a large tree,” Ross Rodgers said.