Twisters, Tragedies And Miracles

By Christopher John Farley Reported By Timothy Roche/Kissimmee, Fla.

Last Monday, 18-month-old Jonathan Waldick of Kissimmee, Fla., was asleep, wrapped in a blanket, when a tornado roared through his room. After the twister passed, Waldick's great-grandmother, Shirley Driver, along with several neighbors, began a frantic search for the boy.

Thirty minutes later they found him, some 50 ft. from his house, his tiny foot poking out of a pile of tree limbs, trash and other debris. Other than a few scratches, he was fine--and he was still wrapped in that blanket. The house he was blown out of, however, was pulverized.

"I don't care about this as long as he's here," said Driver, as she surveyed the damage left in the twister's wake. "It is a miracle of miracles because only God saved him from what I am seeing now."

By grim coincidence, last week was officially Hazardous Weather Awareness Week in Florida. The storms, spawned by El Nino, that raked across the state generated as many as 10 twisters, probably the worst pack of tornadoes ever to hit Florida at one time. Last week's toll is still being calculated, but so far, 39 people are known killed, 250 injured and two missing. Some 1,700 apartments, pre-fab houses and single-family homes were damaged or destroyed. Total damage estimates exceed $65 million. Dozens of Florida counties have been declared disaster areas; President Clinton, touring some of the worst-hit areas on Wednesday, has promised millions in federal aid.

The state was already hurting. Since last fall, damage from severe weather around the state has approached $100 million, not including last week's havoc. "There just aren't a whole lot of areas in Florida that have not felt the impact of these treacherous weather patterns we've had since October," says Craig Fugate, the bureau chief for preparedness and response for the Florida Division of Emergency Management. "You generally don't see the whole state under this deluge of rainfall. We're not even cleaned up after one storm before we're looking at the strong possibility of another one coming. We're hoping this is not foreshadowing what we're going to see in March and April."

There were stories of survival too improbable for Hollywood. After a twister ripped off the roof of Steve Mitchell's house in the Flamingo Lakes subdivision near Kissimmee, Mitchell found his 8-year-old son still sleeping safely--and soundly--in his room. There were, of course, tales of tragedy as well. Five-year-old Ashley Himes was the sole survivor after a tornado ripped apart her family's triple-wide mobile home in Sanford, in Seminole County. Her mother Penny Hall, 21, her mother's fiance Kevin Taylor, 23, and her grandparents Edward and Debra Hall were all killed. Ashley was found wandering in a daze in some nearby woods. "You know, she's my only grandchild, and I'm just glad she's here," says her grandmother Kandi Weaver. "She's been through a lot. Everybody's been through a lot. She told me that the tornado had picked her up and threw her into the woods. And I told her that it did the same thing to her mother, but it had just hurt her a little more, and she was in heaven."

--By Christopher John Farley. Reported by Timothy Roche/Kissimmee, Fla.