That time I opened the door to a Tornado....

Oh yea, that was last night.
Holy hell.
Let just start with, home girl here doesn't like bad storms. Tornadoes, HELL NO.
I'm sitting on Facebook around 9 when the lightning picks up. I check every so often & it just looks like a strobe light outside. Okay, at about 9:15p.m, I posted "Got some strobe light effects going on outside. Lightning is crazy." on Facebook, very shortly after that my computer had shut itself down on me. Okay fine, I decided not to start back up. I went to the living room with my family & sat down to watch TV. About 9:20 I got up to go look outside again & as I approached the door I could already feel the wind. Well I opened it anyway & then shut it right back, my mom said it slammed shut? I then proceeded to turn around and go to the kitchen get my purse and take myself downstairs. As I did that, my dad and brother looked at me & each other & said," that's not good." They got up to go check and as they opened the front door you could year things sliding & the wind tried to shut it back and they all followed me down. Had enough time to grab as many of our animals and they could and get to my room. Right as we started to file into my room the lights went out and the doors and windows went to banging and rattling & the pressure in my ears was innnnsane!
And then, just like that, it was gone. Less than a minute, maybe 30-45 second.
We are fortunate. We are all okay. Our house was, for the most part, spared. We have minimal damage, a gutter was ripped off and some flashing that was ripped off. My nephews swing set is tore down. My dads building was shifted about 5 or 6 inches or so. And we have an uprooted tree in the back yard that thankfully fell the opposite way of our house. Things on our back porch were scooted and flipped. My mom had a trellis arch over a bird feeder in our side yard, it's twisted and broken. The wind took my brothers Toyota emblem off the back of his 4Runner. And our mailbox looks like it might have been slightly turned. We were out of power until about 12:20am & and we still have no satellite.
We have a neighbor that had a tree fall on his truck, but I don't think it did significant damage. And then our other neighbor had their trampoline blown from their front yard to their back, and had a hole in their room somewhere. And the house directly across from mine had to big trees at the end of their driveway down, one of them took down part of their neighbors fence. The guy on the corner had a couple of trees down in his yard. Whew.
Now... I live in a subdivision with one main road & 2 side roads. We live off of the first side road, the other side road got it worse than we did. That road has been blocked off. I talked to the Sheriff earlier, he's family to my husband-and me technically-. Anywho, he was just riding through and saw me, he didn't know we lived on this road and he stopped and got out and talked to me. He was telling me that the next road over is pretty bad. Houses damaged and all. It's been on the news several times. There was one lady trapped in her basement, but she was able to be rescued without injury. Last night after it had happened and we were trying to look around in the dark, we were looking on our back porch & could see fire or something through the woods (on the other road). So, I'm not sure what exactly was happening there but it was extinguished pretty quickly.
Everyone (friends, family) that I knew to check on last night that was in the path of the storm was okay. As far as I know everyone else in the line was okay too, so that's good. Things can be replaced, people cant.
There was "damage to 15 homes, 4 of which were destroyed." According to my local paper's FB page. It was finally confirmed that it was in fact a low scale tornado, EF-0 to EF-1 and that the most extensive damage was done in my subdivision (on the other side road, no doubt).
Thanking God that everyone came out okay & praying that anyone with extensive house damage will be able to rebuild or fix with no troubles.
Can read more here & here.
Okay, enough with my novel. Here are some pictures:

 Side yard

 Uprooted tree in the back

 What's left of nephews swing set/fort thing. (swing set is gone)

 back porch

 Neighbors houses.

News chopper flying over to see to get overview shot of the other road. Channel 2 News, for anyone in GA.

As soon as I can I want to walk down the other road and look.
I know what I posted is absolutely nothing compared to what some of them are dealing with. :(

Talk about one hell of a night & a long day!
Whew!
TGIF.
The good thing is we get my nephew this weekend! Haven't seen him in almost a month, I've missed him!

Hope everyone has a great day!
♥♥♥
Brandy