by Susan Beckman
The Wizard of Oz is reminiscent of a house being lifted into the air, spinning, then crashing down……boom!
Darrell Giles and his family never dreamed they would experience this in real life on Friday, March 2, 2012, in Henryville, Indiana.
Darrell recounts, “I turned on the news and they mentioned we had 16 minutes until the storm would hit our area. My wife started packing up a safe place in the closet — blankets, pillows, everything she could fit in there.
“The sky looked pretty decent for a storm. I walked around the corner of the house and there was a funnel cloud off in the distance. It looked like it was going to miss us, but it was still pretty scary. I just watched it for a little bit. As it got closer, it kind of started to dissipate. I was praying it would skip me and not give us a direct hit. It decided to pick up speed and drop all the way down. I could tell it was coming right for us. I started hearing it breaking trees, picking up limbs, and getting darker in color. I ran into the house and squeezed everybody I could squeeze into the closet.”
Trish told the children, “You’re going to hear loud noises. It might be you can’t feel Mommy’s hand anymore, but it’s going to be over real soon and God’s going to protect you. Just keep praying.” Trish was praying, “God, no matter what, save my babies, save my babies.” Then she remembers the house spinning.
Darrell says, “As soon as I heard the roar, I started hearing stuff break; glass breaking, 2-by-4’s snapping, and then you could just feel the house shift and just lift up in the air. I don’t know how high it was. It flipped over on its top and it just crashed down, one big crash right on the ground. Boom!”
“I don’t think I was out very long, just a few seconds. But I raised up and my wife was right in front of me. She was crying. She said her back hurt. I tried to help her, but I could barely move myself. I couldn’t breathe and it hurt so bad. I saw my kids all strung out on the other side of us, not too far away. They were all laying face down, not moving. I decided to holler out to them, but I couldn’t even move. I hurt so bad.
“Caleb was the first one to move. Then Collin started crying. Mia laid there for a minute, then she got up. I tried to help my wife, but I just couldn’t. So, one shoe on and one shoe off, I tried to walk over to the kids and just get them cleared. The sun came out a little bit and it looked pretty decent outside.
“I got up the hill a little bit, kind of rested on a tree where, thank God, somebody saw me. They come down to help. I told them to go down and help my wife because she was trapped. It was taking me forever to walk.
“We started to go up the hill. That’s when I looked back to see what was going on with Trish. Right over the same horizon there was a great big tornado working up. It was all swirling around. It hadn’t made the exact funnel yet, but it was coming. That guy turned around to see what I was looking at and he saw it. He picked up a piece of plywood and covered Trish with it as best he could. Hail started falling.”
With every rib broken, a broken sternum and clavicle, a broken jaw and punctured lung, Darrell pressed on. “All I could find was some drywall, little pieces. So I squished the kids together, put everyone’s head together and just covered our heads up with some drywall. Pretty much got beaten to death with baseball-sized hail. I was hit in the base of the skull. That lasted probably two or three minutes. It seemed like a half-hour. Not knowing if that tornado had dropped or not, whether it was coming or no idea. Just staying there with absolutely no protection at all.
“That finally passed and we got up and somehow made it to a neighbor’s house. The guys that got my wife stopped and told me, ‘We picked her up and we’ll take her.’ Another guy was going down the street helping, so he stopped to see if he could help me. He said the road was blocked out one way with power lines and trees. And going up the other way, he didn’t know yet. His house was down there. His wife and kids were home. He hadn’t been there to see them, but yet he was stopping to help other people on the way. He just asked could he run home and check on his family.
“I was trying to call 911 myself because nobody’s phone was working. Every once in a while you could stick a call through. I tried to call 911 four or five times; once I got the lady to say hello, but that was it. That’s about all she wrote. You couldn’t communicate. It was like they were just doing the best they could with what they had. And I would say the people did an awesome job. It was just mass confusion. It was just a big mess. Cell phones didn’t work. But everybody worked together and did an awesome job.
“They took the kids to Kosair. I had no idea where my wife went. My kids were going to Kosair. And I went to Clark. Collin, who hadn’t had a scratch on him, just stayed at Grandma’s house. She didn’t have a scratch on her. So they stayed there and two kids going to Kosair and my wife going to – I don’t know where. No cell service. I’ll never stop knowing how much we were blessed and how much worse it could have been. The man just right across the street got slammed with a tornado that got him and killed him and tore up a lot of stuff. Heard a lot of people who had it a lot worse. Just praise the Lord, it could have been so much worse.”
Darrell keeps saying, “Another reason I thank God is…” and then telling some other anecdote that showed how much worse things could have gone. One thing is that the tornado brought down many power lines, which were hissing all over the ground. It was dangerous territory for the survivors and rescuers, even after the tornado was gone and the hail had stopped. But no one was electrocuted. God is merciful and sovereign.
Trish said, “There was five little prayers in that closet, all different prayers. But I think all five of them worked. Wasn’t one better than the other, all five of them, God heard them.”
They are telling their children over and over how wonderful God was and how much He loves them all and how much they should thank God for keeping them safe.
They give God the credit in answering their prayers and miraculously saving their family. “We just had to have angels helping us to land a little softly.”
Darrell suffered a punctured lung, every rib broken, a broken jaw, shoulder, clavicle and sternum, with a total of 19 broken bones.
Trish suffered a shattered pelvis, collapsed lung, and shoulder injury.
Caleb, age 11, had some bruised ribs and a broken back in two places. He was scheduled to have back surgery, but doctors now say he does not need surgery. He will be in a back brace for at least six weeks and is expected to fully recover.
Collin, age 10, only had a couple bruises.
Mia, age 8, suffered a severe concussion and a bruised liver. She was in a medically-induced coma for a short time to allow healing. When she woke up, her first words were “We survived.”
