By Lizanna Dobbs

If Mary Ramsey’s brother, who was watching The Weather Channel, hadn’t called her from Florida, she would have never been alerted about the twister headed directly toward her Shell gas station and car wash on Northwest Broad Street.

“We just thought it was bad weather, until he called us,” remembered Ramsey.

As the weather turned from bad to worse, customers began to pull up under the protective canopy of the gas station to escape the hail. They watched from inside the store and under the canopy as the storm quickly approached. One of Mary’s employees called her over to point out “a funny looking cloud,” which was actually the tornado.

“Then it got quiet, almost too quiet.” That’s when Mary said she knew something horrible was headed for their store.

With no time to turn off the gas feeding into the pumps, Mary hollered for the customers watching the storm to hurry inside. Hiding in a small whitewash hallway to get away from the glass, Mary and 10 others huddled together waiting what they feared would be a direct hit.

The group watched in terror and disbelief as the roof was sucked up into the tornado above and then slammed right back down, leaving ceiling tiles scattered all across the store.

After the chaos of the storm settled, Mary and the other survivors stepped out into a now windowless station, with most its inner contents scattered across the parking lot and the street outside. Along with the building next door, Huddleston Steele, the car wash was completely destroyed.

Most windows were blown out of cars and the once beautiful forest of trees behind the station, where Mary and her family posed for winter wonderland pictures, was left mangled from the storm.

Two fuel pumps toppled over during the storm but the machines automatically shut off to prevent a spill of gasoline.