Taking cover: Storm leaves some shaken
Taking cover: Storm leaves some shaken

By John A. Williams

Published: April 1, 2008

EDMOND — Marcie Isaacson considers herself lucky despite losing her home to an early morning tornado.

She said she first heard warnings of power outages along NW 182 near her home in the Valencia neighborhood about 1:30 a.m. Monday. She wasted no time in taking cover with her twin 4-year-old sons.

"I grabbed my twins, and we huddled in the laundry room,” she said. "Then I heard glass breaking, and I kept hanging on to my boys. I was so afraid we were going to be sucked out.”

What she heard was the sound of her roof being torn off as what meteorologists are now calling an F-1 tornado swept through her neighborhood.

"We stayed there huddled in the room and then I heard people screaming for me, screaming my name and I thought they must be inside the house,” she said. "I didn't know our roof was gone.”

Down the block from the Isaacson home, Luke Ennis was looking at the damage to the house he bought just last month. The strong winds tore a corner off the roof near his daughter's bedroom.

"We heard it coming about a split second before it hit,” he said. "I told everyone to get up. It was real quiet at first and then ‘boom,' water was coming into the house.”

Cleanup crews were working in the neighborhood Monday to salvage possessions for the Isaacsons and covering the holes in the roofs of homes, but showers hit again about noon.

Not everyone was braced for the damaging winds that raced through several northwest Edmond additions in the middle of the night.

Sandra Lyon thought it was strange when a girlfriend called her about 2 a.m. Monday, waking her from a dead sleep.

"She said she heard there was a possible tornado over my neighborhood and she wanted to make sure I was awake,” she said.

She wasn't. Lyon said she had gone to bed Sunday night and slept through the storms that brought rain, hail and a tornado.

"Then my electricity went out, but when it did come back on and I heard the report, it was right over Valencia,” Lyon said. She said she immediately took cover in her house. She later discovered the extent of the damage around her home.

A number of people said they would have slept through the storms if family members or friends had not called to check on their welfare.

Another Valencia resident, Patrick Will, said he was asleep when the warning sirens first went off. "I brushed it off and didn't get up until my brother-in-law called and said there was a tornado in our neighborhood,” he said.

His next-door neighbor, Michael Demours, said he had been watching the weather before he went to sleep Sunday night but was awakened around 1:30 a.m. by a phone call from his brother. The strong winds soon followed, tearing down his fence and driving fence rails into the roof of his house.

Ann-Clore Duncan, a resident of the Mulholland neighborhood, said she and her family were asleep as the storms were approaching.

"Someone had to call and wake us up,” she said. "We lost our electricity around 1:50 a.m. so I think the storms hit us between the time we heard the Oklahoma City sirens and the Edmond sirens.”

Lyon said she even heard from someone she never expected to hear from, her ex-husband.

"I had to laugh,” she said. "I said to him ‘now you're going to show you care.'”

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