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Residents in Chambers County near Mont Belvieu are still cleaning up after a tornado touched down last night leaving quite a bit of damage. It was pretty scary stuff in the Lanai subdivision and not just because it was Halloween. The EF1 twister that hit took out fences, smashed home and car windows and caused quite a fright.
“We ran and hid in the closet until we knew it passed over. It was scary,” admits Troy Smart.
Shane Ward was fighting with the tornado trying to hold on to his garage door. “Yeah the whole time I was holding on with both hands. I couldn’t let it go. It would have ripped it off. It was pretty scary." "Why were you outside?” reporter Damali Keith asked Ward, which seems to be the question of the day.
“Well, I love watching the storms,” says Brian Dietz.
As the tornado took out nearly everything it touched, did Dietz duck for cover, run for safety, huddle in his home? Nope. He stood outside and watched. “I seen the telephone pole snap and that trailer you can see over there was rolling. Luckily it got hung up on the guide wires and didn’t crash through our house."
"All of this madness is going on. Things are flying in the air. Debris is flying right by you and you’re standing outside watching it?" Keith asked. "Well I came outside,” smiles Dietz, and, yes, he stood in front of his house during a tornado watching the twister rip his neighborhood apart. “I figured real quick it was time to go inside. Soon as I went in I lost power. I still ain’t got power back.”
“Just a couple minutes after the power went out we heard a lot of racket, stuff being thrown on the side of the house. Me and my fiancé walked out the backdoor and we almost got sucked out the back door,” adds Smart.
“It literally sounded like a train coming through. All you could hear was the wind just roaring,” explains Ward. The National Weather Service confirms it was a tornado that ripped through the neighborhood. Fortunately, no one in the subdivision was injured.