Tornado with 130 MPH Winds Tears Through Coastal Florida City

“I watched it for about 20 seconds to see which way it was going to move and then obviously, when I saw it kind of closing in toward us, I immediately shut the slider, went back in, huddled in the bathroom, the building started to shake, there was a lot of noise for 20 to 25 seconds,” said Andrew Laybourne, a Palm Beach Gardens resident.

“I got chill bumps on my arm,” Jason Rash, another resident, recalled. “I’m lucky to be alive. I had my back against the concrete wall. I’m in an open-air parking deck and I’m like, ‘I’m going to get blown away. If I stand here, I’m going to get slammed against the wall.'”

At the time, Rash was talking on the phone with his son, at a gym across the parking lot, WBAL reports.

“The whole time when you’re thinking about your child trapped in a building over here and he can’t get out and you can’t get to him and I was like, ‘Oh my God, my life is in danger’ and that’s when I ran to get to the stairwell,” Rash recalled.

“(My son) started crying and he was like, ‘Dad, what can I do?’ and I was like, ‘Get down! Get down! Get down!'” he added.

National Weather Service Miami reports that the tornado – which was about a quarter of a mile wide – touched down between 5:10 pm to 5:21 pm. The storm left behind a path of destruction stretching over 2 miles.

According to the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department, no fatal injuries have been reported.

Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Jason Persoff Stormdoctor, this is a stock image.

Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer and content creator. He is a contributing writer for Christian Headlines and the host of the For Your Soul Podcast, a podcast devoted to sound doctrine and biblical truth. He holds a Masters of Divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary.