Archives: An Interview With A Springfield Tornado Witness

Hanover Middle School Student Has Near Miss With Springfield Tornado

One of the benefits that you the reader enjoy when reading this column is that the authors who compose it have a lot of friends who end up in the news.

Remember that family who got shot at by the Route 3 sniper, the one where the window blew out next to the 5 year old kid? The mother went to high school with Stacey. Remember the Wareham double murder? Yours truly may or may not have put that kid's head off a car door a month prior. Abdullah knew the witnesses, too.

The pattern continues today. The Colonel is actually very good friends with the parents of Ceara McLaughlin (one of whom is my nutrition counselor), who was all over the news yesterday. Ceara was in a school bus, and on her way home from a trip to Six Flags amusement park in Agawam. Sounds fun so far, right?

Her bus ride home may have been the worst bus ride ever, or at least the worst bus ride since the one in Dirty Harry or that Speed movie. Before she cleared Springfield, her bus was forced to stop as the Springfield tornado roared across the highway in front of it.

Thanks to brave Ceara and her friends from the Hanover Middle School Chorus, we have some details and photographs of the action.

We immediately dispatched Ted to speak with Ceara and get the first hand info. Ceara is 14, and has that bounce-backedness that all kids have when faced with something that would scare me so badly that I'd start making Apocalypse Now speeches... "You must make a friend of horror, or it will become a formidable enemy..."

Ceara actually seems pretty upbeat about it. In a situation where I would be throwing children aside to escape faster, she kept her wits, got a pretty good description of the whole event, and even snapped some pictures.

Without any further ado, I present to you my good friend Ceara McLaughlin.

Ted- Give me a brief description of what happened....

Ceara- We were riding home from Six Flags and there was a little traffic, I'm not sure which road we were on, but we were on some highway near Agawam.

   We started to see rotating clouds and most people thought it wouldn't become anything, but then it started to make a funnel cloud. It came closer and we saw that there were dirt, shingles, and small boards spinning around, and then it crossed the highway right in front of us.

   It went to the other side of the highway, over a few buildings (picking up more shingles off of roofs of buildings), and then it went over a house on a hill and we saw it ripping up little parts of the roof. Then it disappeared!

   We figured out later that the little one we saw actually didn't disappear over the hill - it went on to become much bigger, and that was most likely the one that ripped through Springfield.

- Did you (or anyone you know) get any pictures of the tornado? (If yes, email it to me)
- A lot of my friends took pictures so I'll attach them, not sure if they're that clear :P (Editor's Note: They're superb.)

- How much did the tornado miss you by?-  It probably missed us by around 50 feet. I was in the back, but the people in the front said it came really close to them, they were almost in it.

- What does a tornado look like that close up?
- Well, it looks weaker than it is. You think it isn't that strong, but then it rips up a tree. It's really, really fast and just whips around wherever it wants to go.

   I was kind of afraid it would double back and go right into us or something, or that it would get close enough that some of the stuff it was carrying would fly into the windows and break them. It was really dark too, especially the clouds around it.

- What did the trip's chaperones tell you to do when the tornado came at you?
- They were kind of amused, but then when it got closer they were telling everyone to stay calm and that we would all be fine. After it went to the other side of the highway and across the hill, they were actually joking around that there was a cow floating around in it.

- Did the bus driver have to jam on the brakes or anything radical?
- Basically, everyone around us was slowing down when they saw it, then they stopped, and a few people even backed up. But no, nothing too dramatic.

- Did anything funny fly by, like a cow or a pickup truck?- Hahahahahaha nope!

- If there was a girl named Dorothy on the bus, would you have ordered her off?- Absolutely xD

- Who was the coolest head on the bus? If this were a movie, it'd be the football player, but I'm wondering if it might have been the Eagle Scout instead, or one of the smoker types.
- I'm not really sure, I was mostly paying attention to my friends around me, I could barely see who was in the front of the bus.

- Was the screaming louder on the bus than on the roller coaster at Six Flags?
- Not on our bus, we were actually relatively calm, just. A few people were yelling or crying, but not quite screaming. There were a few people on other buses who were really freaking out.

- How scared were you?- Well, I saw that it probably wouldn't pick up a person or a car- judging by the fact that it was only carrying some shingles, boards, and other debris- so I wasn't that freaked out. But I was pretty scared that it would come near us and blow us around, or something would fly into the windows. The lightning and other weather we saw afterwards was really scary, though!

- What does a Tornado vs. House look/sound like?
- When it hit an actual house, it was too far away to hear, but it looks pretty odd. The house loses every time!  xD

- Not related to the storm, but what was the coolest ride at Six Flags?
- I went on this older roller coaster called the "Thunderbolt" a ton of times, and that one was really fun!

 Photos courtesy of the Hanover Middle School Chorus