Tornadoes can be fickle beasts, Joe Carver said Tuesday.
“It’s like God is tracing a finger along and says, ‘this house needs to go, and this house needs to go, and this house can stay,” he said, shortly after returning to the mangled wreckage that was his trailer house.
Carver, who lives just south of Iola on 1300 Street, was slightly injured when the house was blown from its foundation.
He suffered a nasty gash to his forehead, but was coherent enough after the storm passed to drive himself to the hospital. He received several stitches and underwent a CT scan to ensure there were no further injuries.
Carver was dismissed from the hospital shortly thereafter.
CARVER was watching weather updates on TV Monday evening when the storm hit.
“I looked out the window and could see it approaching, and the wind was picking up,” he recalled. “I heard this awful roar,” he said.
Carver remembered he had left a window open in his bathroom, and raced to close it. As he arrived, he realized the wind wasn’t blowing in, but instead the storm “was sucking the air out of the house,” he said. “It sounded like a train. That could have been the funnel cloud.”
While the National Weather Service did not confirm a tornado, video footage recorded by Joshua Riebel, Carver’s neighbor to the west, indicated a distinctive funnel cloud near Carver’s house amid flashes of lightning.
As Carver closed the window, he felt the entire mobile home being lifted from its foundation.
“It dropped onCe, then did a somersault,” Carver said.
Like a stack of cards, the house fell apart.
WITHIN A minute, all was calm.
Carver found himself sprawled in the dirt, uncertain exactly how injured, or where, he was.
