MD Emran and his wife Annie Mia were about to spend their first full day in their new house in Tallahassee’s South City neighborhood when the tornadoes hit.
The couple had been slowly moving into the house after a May 3 closing. They decided to spend their first night in it on May 9, the day before three tornadoes and 100-mph straight-line winds brought destruction to parts of Tallahassee and plunged most of the city into darkness.
On the morning of May 10, Emran, a roadway designer for the Halff engineering consulting firm, got up and stepped into the washroom as his wife and their 19-month-old son lay in bed. A weather warning went off on their phone as the wind began whipping up debris outside their bedroom window.
Out of nowhere, a tall pine next to their property snapped in half and landed on their roof, ripping a giant hole over the living room, impaling walls with branches and piercing the water heater, which along with the rain flooded the house.
“Like a car crashing — that was the noise that we had,” Emran said. With the howling winds and the cracking of fallen trees outside, it was “too much noise,” he said.
They opened the bedroom door to find the living room in shambles, with two-by-fours, ceiling fixtures and duct work dangling around the hole in the roof and white insulation coating the floor like wet popcorn.
The couple’s house on Ashburn Drive is not far from where two EF-2 tornadoes converged, heavily damaging neighborhoods just south of Apalachee Parkway, including Indianhead Acres and Woodland Drives. On Wednesday, the area was a focus of recovery efforts, with streets still lined with fallen timber but full of heavy equipment, utility trucks and repair crews.
Nearly 70,000 city of Tallahassee electric customers lost power in the storm, though that number was down to 895 by Thursday morning. City officials have said they expect to restore power to the vast majority of customers by Friday.
But Emran and others on Ashburn Drive are still waiting for clean-up and power crews to arrive. He said residents cleared a path to walk through and later to drive through on their own. Aside from the crane that came to remove the tree from his house, no other repair crews have been out, he said.
“Every time I call and talk to the city, they will say close to Friday,” he said. “Friday’s tomorrow. I haven’t seen any work start yet.”
Emran’s neighborhood is among the places that were still offline as of Thursday morning. His wife and their son have been spending most of their days inside their Toyota RAV4, with Emran joining them each day when he gets off work.
“It’s not easy,” he said, “but we’ll survive it.”
They own one unit in a two-story duplex next door, where they lived before buying their “dream house,” Emran said. When it cools down at night, they go inside and sleep on a small mattress they saved from their new house.
The duplex has become a housing lifeline for the family. But they had listed it for rent and planned to use the proceeds to cover the mortgage on their new place.
Now, they’re stuck with two mortgages, a half-ruined house and no rent payments should they stay in the duplex. The two mortgages and their car payment equals about what Emran earns each month.
“It’s going to be challenging,” he said. “Where am I going to find that money?”
He doesn’t know yet whether the house can be repaired and, if so, whether the cost will exceed his insurance coverage. If it can be repaired, he said he was told it could take six months to a year.
“It’s a terrible thing,” he said.
Contact Jeff Burlew at [email protected] or 850-599-2180.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Tallahassee tornado outbreak wrecks new house after couple moves in
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