'One badass storm': Gusts tear through SW Tallahassee neighborhoods, leaving destruction
The line of severe thunderstorms that passed through Tallahassee Friday morning packed tornado-force winds that downed power lines, uprooted trees, and shook homes from the campus of Tallahassee Community College to Florida State University.
Entrances to south-west-central neighborhoods at Lake Bradford Road and Stuckey Avenue, Orange Avenue and Paul Dirac Drive, and Pensacola Street at Blountstown Highway, were blocked by tree debris, law enforcement and utility workers during Friday's morning commute.
An uprooted utility pole still attached to transmission lines dangled above a sidewalk in front of Gordo’s Restaurant at the intersection of Pensacola Street and Lipona Drive.
Mark Francis was in the kitchen when he heard the metal roof above him start to move and slide away after 7 a.m.
Francis said he backed out of the kitchen to the front of the building and looked out the window and saw what he took to be a tornado.
“It was all white. All I could see was white. And then it seemed to walk across the street,” he said pointing to the north and east toward FSU.
A lot that sits between his home and the restaurant is filled with split tree trunks, broken branches and pine limbs jutting from the soil like abandoned spears.
The wind appeared to have cut a swath between TCC and Innovation Park. Then it crossed the railroad tracks and swept along Pensacola Street where it turned toward FSU and downtown.
“This looks like a bomb went off,” said Francis standing in his backyard.
Sara Sweetapple, Francisco De La Fontaine, and Q joined a group of gawkers along Pensacola Street. The trio said they had followed a path of destruction from their homes on Tomahawk Trial south of Jackson Bluff Road up Lipona to Pensacola Street.
They compared the damage to that of a hurricane.
"I've been through a lot of big storms but nothing like this,"said Sweetapple. "Hurricanes are usually long drawn out. "This was intense. It came with no warning, left quickly, but the damage left is as if we got hit by a Cat 4."
De La Fontaine and a man known only as Q said they were awakened by a tornado warning before 7 and then things began to happen.
“I thought this is just another Tallahassee tornado warning and was about to go back to sleep,” said Q. “But when I looked out the window, I said, ‘I should not be doing this.’”
He sought shelter in a windowless bathroom.
“My bed is in the corner of the room and the house began to shake, to flex, it moved the bed two inches from the wall,” said De La Fontaine, illustrating the measurement with his fingers.
“It was insanely loud. We live next to the railroad tracks, and this was like a train was in the house,” said Sweetapple.
An oaktree next to the house was uprooted, along with the driveways’ pavement.
De La Fontaine said earlier this week he had just replaced a fence knocked down last year by Hurricane Idalia.
“And this was a reinforced fence. It was knocked down just like that,” said De La Fontaine with a sweeping hand motion.
“That was one badass storm. And I'm from hurricane central," said Sweetapple, a Florida native.
James Call is a member of the USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida Capital Bureau. He can be reached at [email protected] and is on X as @CallTallahassee.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: How Tallahassee residents survived the 'badass' storm
