'The Neighborhood Looks Like a War Zone': Pensacola Residents Cope after Tornado Destroys Homes

"I'm trying to find where to go," D'Assia Lewis, a resident of The Moorings, the apartment complex that bore the brunt of the tornado's fury, told the Pensacola News Journal. "I lost everything. I have nothing." 

No deaths or major injuries have yet been reported from the preliminary EF3 tornado, but residents are reeling after what was certainly a terrifying evening. 

The tornado paved a path of destruction estimated to be 2 miles long from Northpointe Boulevard to Scenic Highway.

Escambia County officials say there have been six injuries reported so far, but details have not yet been released. 

Structural damage was most striking at The Moorings apartment complex, where three buildings and a total of 30 units were damaged. Twenty-four of those units were destroyed.

"There was a very loud whistle, almost like a screaming freight train," Kariynah Pearson, who has lived at The Moorings for 8 years, told weather.com. Then, at 8 p.m., the lights flashed out. "I ran in the hall with my son where we lit a wick. Seconds later the water was sucked from my toilet and I heard the strongest roar that sounded like a bulk of trains."

Pearson said she prayed all day. She said she knew the weather was taking a turn for the worse when she heard the announcement about the "particularly dangerous situation" on the news at her job at Sacred Heart Health Systems. She knew the tornado might be coming, but she had no idea what would happen to her apartment complex.

"When I saw what happened to the apartment complex, I was broken," she said. "I saw people walking away from their homes with the little that they had left, faults in the payment, destroyed buildings that no longer had roofs, and personal possessions on the ground."

Pearson said she can't go back home yet; it's not been cleared as safe. For now, she's living in a hotel with her 9-year-old son.

"Hopefully, I'll be able to return home. I miss my home."

Other residents were picked up by family members, and many hopped on the buses to the nearest shelters.  Some residents congregated at a nearby gas station, which was also without power. 

Oldshue, a drone videographer from Fairhope, Alabama, about 30 miles west from Pensacola, took an aerial video of the damage the morning after the tornado struck. His video, which shows the destruction of a subdivision, the apartment complex and a GE plant, has gone viral.  

Gred Weatherly, a surgical sales rep in Pensacola, lives in the Northpointe subdivision a couple of miles down the road from the apartment complex. 

He said the warnings from the local news allowed him to get a leg up on the storm, leaving work early to prepare. He knew the tornado was near when, around dinner time, the power started flickering. 

"All I could hear was snap, crackle, pop," Weatherly told weather.com. "It sounded like a train was coming." 

The whole ordeal lasted less than a minute, and Weatherly and his mother were among the lucky ones in the neighborhood. Their house sustained no damage – but the back yard was a different story.

"We have no fence. It's gone," Weatherly said. "We have somebody's shed in our back yard, [but I] don't know whose it is." 

Just a half a block down, he said, houses are completely destroyed: roofs caved in, glass shattered.

"The neighborhood looks like a war zone," he said.

But the neighborhood has banded together to help their neighbors in need. "Everybody in our neighborhood got out last night and helped people," Weatherly said. 

In a place where most residents have dealt with at least one major hurricane in their lifetime, this was something totally different. Residents and officials will work together to repair the damage done, but it could be quite some time before the power is restored, and the community is rebuilt.