Conway terror twister shock

The first February tornado ever recorded in Massachusetts terrified Conway residents Saturday and left them sifting through debris that shattered windows, ripped off roofs, and uprooted trees in the small Franklin County town.

“I thought we were going to die, I was screaming, ‘We’re going to die! We’re doing to die!’ — total panic attack,” Cami MacDonald told the Herald, recalling the EF-1 tornado that touched down around 7:20 p.m. Saturday night. “It seemed like it lasted forever, but it was pretty quick. It was terrifying.”

The twister, with wind speeds gusting up to 110 miles per hour, first hit the neighboring town of Goshen around 7:18 p.m., according to the National Weather Service.

“The tornado then touched down with a vengeance on Main Poland Road in the western part of Conway,” an NWS statement said.

No serious injuries were reported even though more than a dozen structures were damaged, officials said.

In its wake, the tornado left snapped trees and uprooted a large maple in MacDonald’s backyard that narrowly missed her home.

Grant Ingle, who lives in a 220-year-old house that had nearly all of its windows smashed, said he saw parts of roofs flying down the street.

“All of a sudden it started to sound like a freight train,” Ingle said, standing near a pile of felled tree branches several feet high. “I walked downstairs and ... I could hear windows breaking. There was all sorts of debris hitting the house, but I was lucky.”

Some of his neighbors were not as fortunate. Just a few hundred yards from his home, another house had the roof and walls ripped apart. Passers-by could peer directly into a downstairs living room and an upstairs bathroom after the front of the house was removed.

Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito, acting as governor with Gov. Charlie Baker in Washington, D.C., said power was restored to the community of fewer than 2,000 people by yesterday afternoon and most of the 30 closed roads had been reopened as experts assessed the damage to buildings.

“This is an incredible community that was touched by a force of nature that could have caused even more harm,” Polito said. “We are grateful that no one was hurt in this process and the emergency response was rapid. It was collaborative and it worked to bring stability to this community.”