What was it like inside the RI tornado? Residents share their stories.

SCITUATE – John Gostanian stood in the picture window of his home along Byron Randall Road on Friday morning, watching sheets of rain fall outside – unaware his neighbors on both sides were, at that moment, dashing for safety.

Homes everywhere filled with the alarms of cellphone alerts warning of an approaching tornado. Gostanian, 50, head of the guidance department at Warwick’s Pilgrim High School, didn’t have his phone with him – nor any power. Trees, he properly reasoned, had probably fallen over the electric lines again.

Then he watched something he’d never seen before.

“The direction of the wind began to swirl,” he said. He could see it happening in the tree canopy. “Everything went from south to north.”

“I heard some thuds.” Enormous trees were falling on both sides of the narrow, woodsy road. The tops of some trees sheared off. “I’ve been here 25 years – hurricanes, tropical storms – I’ve never seen anything of this magnitude. And the whole thing was probably like a one-minute deal.”

National Weather Service surveying to confirm tornado

As he spoke Friday morning, teams from the National Weather Service were inspecting areas of Johnston and Scituate damaged by the powerful storm to determine whether it was indeed a tornado that struck around 8:45 a.m.

Johnston Mayor Joe Polisena Jr. took to Twitter to “confirm” a tornado had indeed touched down on Interstate 295 near Greenville Avenue, and that the fire department responded to a car that had been picked up and dropped, injuring the motorist.

Polisena said areas of Peck Hill Road near the Scituate line and George Waterman Road near North Providence had sustained extensive damage.

Later Friday, the National Weather Service Boston would find that the tornado that tore through Scituate, Johnston and North Providence was an EF-2 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale at its peak, with winds about 115 mph. It was the strongest to touch down in Rhode Island since the Aug. 7, 1986 tornado that hit Providence and Cranston.

Highland Memorial Park Cemetery severely damaged

In the storm’s wake, Highland Memorial Park Cemetery, in the Centerdale section of Johnston, had been transformed into a showpiece to nature’s raw power.

Trees to the west of the grassy cemetery were sheared and uprooted, marking the suspected tornado’s path.

Diane Ames, 62, of Johnston, sadly evaluated the panorama of destruction in the cemetery. It brought her to tears.

As a child she had hiked and picked blueberries around here. As a teen, she learned to drive in the cemetery, and her grandfather had dug its first grave, she said. Now he is buried near Mitchell Pond.

“This place holds a lot of personal memories for me,” she said.

Down the hill, in front of R.I. Tire & Auto Repair Service on George Waterman Road, the storm dislodged a trailered 24-foot boat, the Hanna Rose, and blew it across Amber Street.

Fallen trees, blown-out windows, torn-off roofs

Along the storm's path through Johnston, Scituate and North Providence, residents came out to view the fallen trees, several of which had fallen on parked cars.

On Fitzhugh Street, off Douglas Avenue in North Providence, 61-year-old Dino Florez said it “sounded like a bomb” when a large pine fell in his neighbor’s yard.

On Byron Randall Road in Scituate, the wind blew out the windows and ripped an entire roof of shingles from the custom-built raised ranch of Richard F. O’Neill Jr. and his family.

He, his wife, Mona, and their two children were all home when they heard the tornado warning.

At first Mona joked about whether they needed to go down to the first floor. But then they saw the tree canopies shaking wildly in the wind.

“We heard it,” said Richard O’Neill. “Like a train.”

If they hadn’t retreated to the bottom floor, “We would have been cut up, injured. It would have been unbelievable. The glass is everywhere. The place where we sit, the porch with 13 windows, they all blew out.”

O’Neill had his home built out of California redwood after his first home here burned to the ground, he said.

“I’ve had so much bad luck on this property,” he said. But on Friday, “we walked out of there without a scratch.”

As O’Neill went to console his wife, neighbor Devin O’Leary, 38, took out his chainsaw and began work on the big tree that had fallen across his driveway.

A salesman for Tyco Fire Protection, he was home with his three boys, ages, 8, 6 and 1, and his mother when he heard the cellphone alert.

“I was in my home office, and I got up and looked out the window. Everything went still and I yelled to my mom to get the boys downstairs. By the time we got to the bottom of the stairs, it sounded like a train was coming through the house.”

The garage doors shook, the power went out. “It was 30 seconds long and that was the end of it.”

“I was more scared when it was over,” he said. “Shocking more than anything. I lived here my whole life, grew up one street over, and we had hurricanes and tropical storms, but nothing like this.”

Now he has a hole in the garage to deal with, and a tree in his pool.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: RI weather: A tornado tore through RI. Here's what happened next