Two people lost their lives to the tornado as it ripped through the Merrick Section.
Winds from a tornado blew this truck over at Latino Foods, 23 New Bridge St., West Springfield. James Vallides, owner of the business, said no employees were on the property when the tornado ripped through and destroyed the buildingWEST SPRINGFIELD – Scores of people wandered through the Merrick Section of the city Thursday morning with dazed looks on their faces and stories of a fast-moving horror that came out of nowhere.
This neighborhood, where two people were killed, was hit especially hard. Much of Main Street remained closed to traffic Thursday morning and side streets were littered with tangles of fallen trees and wires.
West Springfield resident Angelica Guerrero, 40, took refuge in a bathtub and covered her 15 year-old daughter as the three-family home on Union Street collapsed around them. The house was leveled.
“There is no doubt she saved her daughter’s life,“ said West Springfield Police Chief Thomas E. Burke.
Sergey Livchin, 23, died in his parked car on a hill on Main Street. His passenger called emergency responders around 4:45 p.m. and Licvhin was pronounced dead at the scene. No cause of death has been determined.
The fierce winds pushed a three-family home at 83-85 Bridge St.off its foundation by three or four feet.
“My father saw something in the distance and knew what it was and told us to grab the kids,” said Tiffany Mansfield, who lived on the second floor with her husband and three children. “The house shook a little bit and the windows exploded, the walls were caving in.”
Mansfield and other family members were among the 50 or so Merrick residents who spent the night at an emergency shelter set up at West Springfield Middle School.
“My Mom’s floor is in the basement, the house is tilted, half the roof is off,” Mansfield said.
“It was bad, I was scared,” said Mansfield’s mother, Lillian Riggs, who also spent the night in the shelter.
The tornado that ripped through the Merrick Section of West Springfield blew this three-family home at 83-85 Bridge St. by some 3 or 4 feet. The 15 residents who lived here escaped serious injury.David Stoddard, who also lived at 83-85 Bridge St., said he ran upstairs to alert other tenants. “We were still up there when it went through,” he said. “It was scary.”
Stoddard said he had no inkling that the house had been shifted off its foundation until afterwards when he went outside to view the devastation.
One street over, New Bridge Street resident James Gilligan said the wind from the tornado sounded like “chattering teeth,” as he and others took shelter in his basement at 69 New Bridge St.
“In Massachusetts you don’t really expect to see a tornado,” Gilligan said. “You hear the warnings and everyone just brushes it off. But this actually just happened - it’s mayhem.”
A short distance away, an overturned truck could be seen at Latino Foods, 23 New Bridge St. James Vallides, the owner of the business, said things had been slow Wednesday so employees knocked off work early, about 15 minutes before the tornado came through.
“Thank God nobody was in the building,” Vallides said, adding that his building, missing walls, “is totaled.”
The interior of another business on New Bridge Street, Felicano’s Ethnic Food Distribution, was open to the sky.