New Orleans resident Bill Dunn woke up in the middle of the night just in time to move his family to shelter from the tornado that struck the Uptown area Monday night. “The chair I had been sleeping in there 15 minutes before, we found it the next morning in our yard. I was just lucky I woke up,” he said. “It ended up taking the office behind my bedroom. It took that whole room and tore it off the house.” Before the storm struck, Dunn didn’t even know there was a tornado in the area. “I didn’t hear like a train like some people say I just heard the popping from the transformer,” he said. “I felt the windows vibrating, and at that point all I could think was that we have to get to safety.” Bill Dunn, whose son Will Dunn is a mass communication senior at the University and a Daily Reveille sports contributor, hurried upstairs to wake up his wife, Linda Dunn and younger son, Tim Dunn. But the tornado had already begun to peel pieces off the house. “I was standing in the door holding the door open for my wife, and the wind hit the door and slammed it shut on my hand. I couldn’t hold it back or open it,” Bill Dunn said. “Finally I got my wife out, and I went to wake up Timothy.” Tim Dunn was fast asleep in the next room when his dad came in. “I heard my dad screaming. He came in the room yelling at me to go downstairs,” Tim Dunn said. “I realized all the windows in my room were blown out, and it was basically raining in my room.” The Dunns’ house, which was virtually untouched by Hurricane Katrina, was destroyed by the tornado. The roof was torn off, windows were blown out and whole sections of the house were ripped apart. “It was like a bomb. Everything around us was completely destroyed,” Tim Dunn said. “We don’t even know if it’s going to be fixed at this point.” Tim Dunn said losing his childhood home was devastating.
“That’s the home I grew up in,” he said. “I lost my car, but that doesn’t bother me nearly as much as my house.” The Dunn family is now split up and staying with friends in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Will Dunn brought Tim Dunn and the family dog back to Baton Rouge with him after helping load the family’s remaining belongings onto a truck. According to the Associated Press, the storms struck the Uptown New Orleans area around 3 a.m. Tuesday morning. The tornado first touched down in Westwego then crossed the Mississippi and hit Carrollton and Gentilly, where it destroyed over 200 structures. Dozens of people were injured, and one elderly woman died after being picked up and thrown from her FEMA trailer. Both Loyola and Tulane universities suffered minimal damage but were forced to cancel classes Tuesday after the mass power outage. Classes resumed as usual Wednesday at both universities. Several area high schools also canceled classes. Chris Price, Loyola law student, said tornado damage throughout the Uptown area is sporadic and varies from street to street. “My block was completely normal, but if you go up a block, it’s crazy how bad it looks. Some of it literally looks like a train ran through it,” Price said. “My friend’s girlfriend lost her roof, and another person actually had the whole entire front of her house ripped off.” Gov. Kathleen Blanco toured the damaged area Tuesday and later declared a state of emergency in Orleans and Jefferson parishes. “It’s terribly upsetting to see so much damage, but the spirit of these citizens is inspiring,” Blanco said in a statement to The Daily Reveille. “Their homes, their possessions, their memories are scattered and drenched, and I pledged to do everything within my power to help them recover.” According to Entergy spokesman Chanel LaGard, 120 homes in the New Orleans area remained without power Wednesday afternoon, down from 30,000 homes during the storm. Entergy hoped to have all power restored by the end of the day. Tornadic activity in the Uptown New Orleans area is not unheard of but is not common. “It’s not frequent for a tornado to strike southern Louisiana. Being really near the coast, that was a little bit uncommon,” said Freddie Ziegler, meteorologist with the National Weather Service stationed in New Orleans. “We had tornadoes in February 2006. The storms were a little stronger, and the area was recovering from Katrina at the time, so there weren’t many people around. This time, people were just about to complete work on their house, and here comes a tornado to wreck their house again.” Having lived in New Orleans their entire lives, the Dunn brothers said they had never experienced a tornado before. “I’ve seen the aftermath of tornadoes on TV, stuff like that. It was almost exactly the same thing,” Tim said. “No flying cows though.”
—–Contact Sarah Yokubaitis atsyokubaitis@lsureveille.com