A Welcome Bay home owner is counting her blessings after a tornado ripped through her family home “like a freight train leaving a trail of destruction”.
Jo Logan and her wife have spent the past two days surveying the damage after a tornado tore through their single-storey three-bedroom home on Welcome Bay Rd, early on Sunday morning.
MetService meteorologist John Crouch earlier said he believed one or more tornadoes hit Tauranga from 1.30am on Sunday, with damage reported in Ōtūmoetai, Maungatapu, Welcome Bay and the Tauranga CBD.
On Monday, Logan said the outcome “could have been far worse” after the tornado struck without warning.
She and her wife Mellanee Kendrick, Kendrick’s daughter Ella McOnie and family friend Monica Williams were woken by an “absolutely horrendous noise“.
“It was terrifying, particularly after the windows in the front bedroom smashed and blew in where Monica and Ella were sleeping, and the roof was torn off. The garage is also gone.
“Ella and Monica were screaming, and Monica told us she genuinely believed they were going to die.”
Logan said after the tornado, sparking power lines were left lying across the home’s roof space.
She said with the roof gone, it was raining and the house started flooding.
They quickly scrambled in the dark to find clothes and a torch, and fled to a neighbour’s.
The tornado tore through the home they had owned for 10 years within seconds, before travelling through neighbouring properties.
Logan said it was ”just like a freight train leaving a trail of destruction".
She said five other homes in their small neighbourhood also suffered severe damage. However, their home on the road frontage bore the brunt as the tornado came down from Maungatapu and through a gully.
Casuarina trees across the road had ”snapped like toothpicks”, she said.
Seeing the damage in the light of day, Logan was astounded they were all uninjured.
She said glass in the front bedroom included “a massive and incredibly sharp shard” on the pillow where Ella had slept.
Logan was amazed no one was injured.
“It’s unbelievable that Ella and Monica were not injured or killed.”
She said there was severe damage to other homes, and a cottage next door lost its roof.
A neighbour’s house had smashed windows, part of the roof was torn off, the chimney had gone, and windows were blown in.
Two other neighbours had windows smashed and damaged roofs and sheds.
A few doors down, the top of a neighbour’s two-storey home was partially twisted.
Logan said a tree smashed through the bedroom window of another house.
She said an insurance contractor visited their property yesterday, and advised her the home had shifted off its foundations and was “structurally compromised”.
They were expecting a call from their own insurer to carry out an insurance assessment on Monday.
“It’s devastating, we’re homeless. But when I woke up this morning, I said to myself, ‘we are all okay, we didn’t die, the house did not burn down, and we are still together’.”
Logan was extremely grateful to people who turned up to help pack belongings into boxes and offered to put them into storage for safekeeping.
“As Mel and I have always said, our home isn’t a palace, but it was our home, and to have it gone like this in just seconds is heartbreaking.”
Logan said they were temporarily staying in accommodation provided by her employer.
“We don’t know how long it will take to find a permanent place to live or whether our damaged home will have to be completely rebuilt.”
Sandra Conchie is a senior journalist at the Bay of Plenty Times and Rotorua Daily Post who has been a journalist for 25 years. She mainly covers police, court and other justice stories, as well as general news. She has been a Canon Media Awards regional/community reporter of the year.