SURVIVING A TORNADO, 40 YEARS TODAY

How time flies.

Forty years ago today I was right in the middle of a tornado. October 3, 1979 is a day myself, my late grandfather and many others will never forget.

After graduating High School in 1977 I had started a small landscaping business. My grandfather used to love tagging along with me, even if it was just riding in my dump truck. I had found an old 1950 International dump truck from a farmer in East Granby. It was a tank, air brakes, no power steering, a split rear axle and it would go though anything. I remember the day I went to DMV to get my class 2 license, the inspector had to go for a test drive  on the road. I remember when he got in the truck and started out, he remarked that if I could handle that truck, I had already passed my road test.

So back to the tornado. It was a rainy wet, humid day. Typical summer weather when you just new the afternoon would be filled with thunderstorms. There wasn't much landscaping to be done in that weather, the lawns were all too wet to mow. My grandfather and I gassed up the dump truck and headed to a sawmill in Granville , Mass to haul back some bark mulch from the mill. The rain was heavy on the way up and even worse on the return home. We had passed an area in East Granby where the rain was washing mud and dirt across Route 20 it was raining so hard. As we headed back into Windsor, we got onto Rainbow Road, just south of the Airport. I had grown up in that area and I was very familiar with the area. We were on Rainbow Road, right near what is now Browns Harvest Pumpkin Patch.

The rain was still heavy and the sky became a strange color, almost jade green. It was chaos around us with the strong wind and sudden green almost darkness, just then trees started snapping and electric poles began snapping off and laying across the road blocking our path, the power lines were popping and arcing all around us.

At the time, long before cell phones and text messaging, we had no idea.what was going on. The 1950 International Dump didn't have an AM radio in it. It was a work truck. The thought of a tornado hitting Windsor never even crossed my mind. Tornado's were things that happened out in the Midwest, not Connecticut.

I am glad we were in that tank of a truck, otherwise  who knows how we would have ended up. With all the debris around us, there was nowhere for us to go. We just had to sit there and try to figure out what had happened. Later that night, much later, utility workers and I think a couple of State DOT workers were coming up behind us clearing a path in the roadway.

We were eventually able to turn around and head back through East Granby to get home. The direction we were headed in , south on Poquonock Avenue in Windsor was the epicenter of what we learned from the Utility crews clearing our path was actually a tornado.  The road ahead of us was closed for some time afterward and there were concerns that there was structural damage to the Poquonock Bridge over the Farmington River.

There were other stories in that truck with Gramp, luckily he had a good strong heart with some of the near misses as he sat in the passenger seat, and that was before seat belts. I still miss you Gramp, but I will always remember the times we spent together