“It was definitely the most scary thing I have ever experienced in my life.”
Those were the words of Moss resident Tina Gavin on Monday following the tornadoes that passed through her small community on Easter Sunday.
The fear, in a sense, still filled her eyes, body movements, and voice as she walked around her all but destroyed family home, while detailing the catastrophic tornadic event.
Gavin can remember it from the beginning – looming skies and low winds to the shattering, wind-blasted windows coming through her home. The heavy winds immediately pushed all of the furniture to one side of her house in each room and tore much of the roof from her home, leaving debris like glass and insulation scattered throughout.
Family members and local rescue volunteers eventually fought their way through downed trees, limbs and rubbish to get to her and her family some three hours after the devastation began Sunday afternoon.
Gavin said her young son, Nicholas, had been having premonitions about the day, and his thoughts fully played out.
“It started about 5 p.m. when Nic got really nervous. He’s really into science and history, and he kept going out to the front porch. He kept telling his daddy, ‘a tornado is coming, a tornado is coming.’ I and his daddy kept telling him God is going to take care of us and to calm down, but he was just a different kind of upset and was pacing the floor from 4:30 p.m. to 5 o’clock, and he packed his bag and got in the tub,” Gavin said.
Not too long after her son’s move to the bathroom tub at one end of the home, Tina and her husband, Mickey, were seeking shelter with Nicholas from something they had never witnessed before in their lives .
“Mickey said ‘take cover’ around 5:23, so I went and got in the tub with Nic, but Mickey didn’t come,” Gavin recalled. “He was standing and watching outside, and he saw it coming over the pond. He had to take off running because it went to shooting glass and breaking glass through our house. He ran and jumped in the tub. All three of us were in the tub.”
When the storm finally passed, the three exited the tub and bathroom area in which they sought refuge. The first things they saw following the storm were daylight through the roof and major destruction in their home. However, the bathroom and tub area where they sought refuge were not touched . . . at all.
“Our house is destroyed, but I am thankful that God spared our lives. I prayed the whole time we were in there. We just prayed,” said Gavin. “Nothing messed with that bathroom. Nothing fell in on us, but when we came out, it had fallen down all around us.”
Gavin mentioned the unforgettable and frightening sounds and sights that were coming from the storm as it passed.
“The roof kept picking up on our house and setting back down. Up and down, up and down. We could hear it and see it. I’ve never been that scared before in my life,” she said.
While Gavin and her family are trying to pick up their lives in the Moss Community, she still feels blessed for her family and others in the area. Several were injured in the Moss Community during the storms and one life, 42-year-old Jessica Spradley, was sadly lost. But the severity these storms unleashed and the destruction within them could have been much worse with injuries and fatalities.
Gavin offered advice that many of us tend to ignore due to familiarity with tornado warnings in Mississippi.
“Everybody needs to take caution to tornado warnings,” said Gavin. “It happened within a split of a second. By the time my husband told me to get in the tub, there was glass breaking into the house.”