KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Storm survivors were remembering where they were ten years ago Saturday when deadly twisters skipped from Kansas City, Kansas to Liberty, Missouri.
“May 4, 2003 — a day many families in the Carriage Hill Estates subdivision in the Northland will remember for a long time.
“I wasn’t expecting to look out my window and see it there,” said Charles Baudwin. “But I could see it.”
On that afternoon, Baudwin recalled he watched the tornado quickly skip toward his house.
“My son and my wife went down to the basement and yelled at me to come down to the basement,” he said.
Baudwin finally joined his family in their basement and they stayed there until the storm had passed.
Just minutes later, they stepped outside and saw their battered house and their neighbor’s house just behind them was destroyed.
“Whenever we saw the house behind us was leveled, a woman and her two children walked up out of the basement and I thought, ‘Oh my God! This is bad,'” Baudwin told FOX 4 News.
The National Weather Service reported a series of four tornadoes that one day in May. It damaged or destroyed a number of homes, knocked down power lines and uprooted scores of trees in a line that stretched from Kansas City, Kansas to Liberty, Missouri.
Two people were killed and more than 30 were injured during the storms that caused more than $113 million in damages.
“It came in about four o’clock in the afternoon,” said Mike Finazzio, another storm survivor.
“We hung out in the corner over here,” recalled Cathy Finazzio.
The Finazzios and their children rode out the storm in their concrete storm shelter located under their garage.
“We were lucky, because the damage was to the upper levels of the house,” Mike Finazzio said.
So what have the storm survivors learned ten years later. They tell anyone who will listen to invest in home insurance and they said then you hear those sirens blasting away to pay attention.
“Get down in the basement or at least into a safe place,” Baudwin said.
“We’re all safe, so all is good,” Cathy Finazzio said.
“We won’t forget it,” Mike Finazzio echoed.
