So many Ruston residents have our own stories.
It was a night (or early morning) to remember. A nightmare many won’t ever forget.
My story isn’t harrowing like so many who were in the direct path of the EF3 tornado that ripped through the midnight black skies of Lincoln Parish five years ago to this day.
I was one of the luckier ones for sure. But in many ways, I was right in the middle of it in my own personal way.
My phone woke me that night around 1:30 a.m. with a weather alert. I had only been asleep for a few hours after getting home from the very last softball game that would ever be played at the old Lady Techster Softball Complex. The Ragin’ Cajuns had defeated Tech 7-2 in a game that ended about five hours before the twister hit.
As I drove away from the complex that night, little did I know that it would be the last game ever played there. Little did any of us know much about what was about to happen.
After waking to the alert on my phone and subsequently hearing the Ruston storm sirens, I still thought it was just another spring thunderstorm and false alarm. I’ve lived in Ruston almost my entire life. Tornadoes don’t hit our area … at least not bad ones … or so I thought.
I jumped on Facebook. I saw one post that a few trees were down around Tech. Nothing about a tornado. I was awake. I was thirsty. So I put Jeter – my one-year-old Border Collie – in my Jeep and headed toward the Chevron on Tech Drive. As I crossed the I-20 bridge on the Tech Exit, it was dark. Lights were out everywhere.
Understandably so.
But, I didn’t stop at the Chevron. I kept heading south on Tech Drive. I still wasn’t sure it was more than a power line or two down, thus causing the blackout. As I came over the hill just to the west of the Marbury Alumni House, my first road block — almost literally — was a huge chunk of concrete in the middle of Tech Drive.
What the heck I thought as I slowly drove around it. I would discover later it was part of the concrete roof of JC Love Field at Pat Patterson Park … about 100 yards from its normal location. Talk about strong winds. That chunk of concrete had to weight a couple of hundred pounds at least. Maybe much much more.
Still things were almost pitch black. It wasn’t until I got to the intersection of Tech Drive and West Alabama Avenue that I was finally able to make out some of the carnage of the tornado. It was like I was seeing this in third person in many ways.
I saw the softball scoreboard ripped into shreds. I saw the pine trees that once lined the railroad laying on top of the press box and bleachers of the softball field. It was at that point, I obviously knew it was bad. Really bad. As I pulled into the parking lot by the softball complex, I was the only person around. I was literally the first person on this particular scene.
Little did I know that the tornado had probably only beaten me to the spot by about 10 to 15 minutes. Max. As I was exiting my Jeep, it was still ripping across the northeast side of Ruston and Lincoln Parish.
My eyes continued to adjust to the darkness, and I made more and more out. Huge steel light poles snapped in half. The turf field shredded like old carpet. And across the street, the dark shadows of the baseball stadium and scoreboard in similar condition.
My first call was to Adam McGuirt, who at the time was in charge of our athletic facilities. He answered. I tried to explain what I was seeing. I obviously failed initially. I remember Adam saying he would call our AD Tommy McClelland in a few hours.
“Adam, I don’t think I’m doing a very good job of describing what I’m seeing here,” I remember saying to him. “Let me try to take a few photos and send them to you.”
Although it was dark, the flash on my camera phone worked. Three or four photos sent. Adam immediately called back to tell me he had just called Tommy. “He is on his way. I’m on my way,” said Adam.
My next call was to Mark Montgomery, the Tech head softball coach at the time. After a two-minute conversation, he said he was heading that way as well.
About 5 to 10 minutes after I arrived on the eerily quiet scene, college students began walking down Tech Drive. They were coming out of apartments around the area. Within 45 minutes, I bet there were 500 people milling around in just that little area by JC Love Field at Pat Patterson Park and the softball complex.
It’s funny the things I remember. One thing I vividly recall was thinking about an hour after I arrived that I still hadn’t seen any emergency vehicles in this vicinity. There were some some road blocks put up at the corner of Tech Drive and West Alabama and at the light under the bridge with the railroad tracks, but that was the only sign that emergency vehicles had been there at any point.
“If they aren’t here, how bad are other areas of Ruston,” I remember asking someone. We didn’t know at that point. It was dark and we were just seeing a small microcosm of the extent of the damage.
By 3 a.m. plenty of Tech officials — campus and athletics — had arrived. And one of the longest days of my life — of so many Ruston residents lives — began.
It still seems somewhat surreal even five years later. Part of me would like to have an out-of-body experience and go back and relive it in slow motion. It was sensory overload in many ways. It was such a whirlwind.
As the sun slowly began to rise and the totality of the impact of the tornado was seen clearer, it felt like it was a third world country in some ways. The damage. The emotions. The shock. The sadness.
My day was filled with assisting media members in my job as athletics communication director to trying to help our softball team decide if and where we would play senior weekend against WKU in my role as softball sport supervisor. In some ways it was the longest yet shortest day of my career.
Again, in many ways such a blur all these years later.
Some of the other things I remember from that first day were:
- TV crews and media members arriving before daybreak starting to get the news out about what had happened to our campus
- Make-shift press conferences with Dr. Guice, Tommy McClelland and Governor John Bel Edwards talking about what we knew
- Driving from the Tech campus to the radio station around 8 a.m. to go on live with Aaron Dietrich who was doing his show on 97.7 FM (it took me quite a while to find a route to get to the radio station due to so many blocked roads)
- Meeting with Coach Montgomery and our Tech softball team to talk through whether they wanted to play that weekend; ultimately traveling to Monroe for a team practice
As the day began to come to an end, I remember making my way down Barnett Springs to Pinewood Lane where I grew up as a child through my high school and college days. My grandparents old house was on that dead end street.
The sight of that street and so many other in the University Hills and Cypress Springs areas was hard to swallow. Hundred plus year old pine trees snapped like twigs, destroying houses … destroying people’s homes.
But my the silver lining of that day and so many to follow was the way the city of Ruston and Lincoln Parish and so many outlying areas came together to help begin the clean up. It was uplifting in so many different ways.
For those of us who grew up in this area and who have called it home for so many decades, we know what a special place Ruston is. We understand what it means to be a good neighbor.
On April 25, 2019, we saw that in action.
A tragedy birthed the wonderful sight of people helping people as our community and our neighbors from surrounding areas came together to begin to build back our beloved parish.
A tragedy that made Ruston Strong.
