Elmore County family trapped for hours after tree fell on home Sunday night
Hiding in a bedroom in her sister’s home with her three kids, mother and sister Sunday night, Whittney Hand posted to Facebook: “Pray y’all ….. tornadoes hit my sister house. We are trapped.”
She asked one of her friends to help get them out, writing, “we are trapped come here.”
She had been sitting in her sister Kristin Hand’s living room in Elmore with her mother that night when the power went out. Parts of Elmore County were under a tornado warning at that time, but she said they didn’t hear a siren at the home on Meadow Lane Drive off Airport Road.
At about 10 p.m., they heard debris hit every window of the home as the wind was swirling outside.
Then, a limb came through the ceiling of the living room.
A large oak tree had fallen on the single-story house, on top of the kitchen and living room. She and her mother avoided being hit by the tree.
The family ran to a bedroom on the opposite end from where the tree landed. Whittney Hand said the roof above the living room was destroyed, and she feared the roof over the rest of the house might cave in.
As her kids cried, she didn’t know if it was safe to try to leave the house. She worried that there might be a downed power line outside the home that someone would step on. To make matters worse, her sister Kristin had just had major surgery a week before, making it difficult for her to walk if they tried to escape.
“Was the whole house going to cave in on us?” she said. “We didn’t know what to do.”
From the bedroom window, she could see neighbors walking with flashlights. She called them over and asked them to help.
More:Storms damage homes, down power lines across central Alabama
At about midnight, the neighbors helped guide them out of the side door while avoiding the power line that had been knocked down in the yard.
The family went to a neighbor’s house to ride out the rest of the storms, which continued through the early morning. Later that morning, they went to her home in Millbrook.
She decided not to take her children to school on Monday. She said she was upset that Elmore County Schools only delayed classes until 9 a.m. after the storms.
“They made them go to school, and all these kids were running to the bus soaking wet. It was raining so hard this morning and they didn’t even call school,” she said. “This is just too much for me right now.”
The National Weather Service hasn’t determined whether the storm that hit Elmore and Macon counties Sunday night and Monday morning was a tornado. That’s left her sister in limbo with relief organizations like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Red Cross, both of which told her that they can’t help with repairs to the home until it’s determined that a tornado hit, Whittney Hand said.
She said relief organizations are trying to find her sister a hotel or temporary home to stay at for now.
"She's pretty torn up about it," Whittney Hand said.
The Hand family set up a GoFundMe, which you can find at this link, to help cover expenses related to storm damage as Kristin is unable to work while she recovers from her surgery.
This story was updated at 2 p.m. with information about the Hand family's GoFundMe.
Evan Mealins is the justice reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser. Contact him at emealins@gannett.com or follow him on Twitter @EvanMealins.
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This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Elmore County family trapped for hours after tree hit home in storms
