Residents of Garden’s Mirabella huddled as windows imploded
One resident said the storm was ‘like a vacuum.’
A day after a tornado blew out the window of the room where her two children were sleeping, Rabia Ahmed is grateful.
S h e a n d h e r h u s b a n d t hought t hei r 9 -ye a r- ol d son and 7-year-old daughter would do best weathering the intense thunderstorms together in a guest bedroom in their home in the Mirabella community of Mirasol. Instead, the front windows collapsed, exposing them to the roof tiles and other debris the storm sent flying.
“My son had glass in his hair,” she said outside their home, speaking to neighbors after the windows had been air-sealed and the house cleaned.
Her husband’s c ar and many of their neighbors’ cars had back windows that were smashed. But there was a common refrain among neighbors of gratitude that no one was seriously injured. Neighbors did say one man got hit in the face with a door.
Connie Aliaga and her husband were asleep across the hall when the storm blew out their front window, spraying wind and water through their bedroom about 2 a.m. They described an eerie scene.
“We saw the whole second floor, bright like day,” she said. “I said, ‘Oh, Lord.’ ”
“We’re going to heaven,” her husband chimed in.
They lost power, so they scrambled to find a way to seal their window. They were still waiting for an insurance adjuster, but they suspected they had a hole in their roof. The shutters on the front of their house were broken.
The damage to their home paled in comparison to their neighbors, whose walls fell down inside their house. The roofs of several houses in the neighborhood were obliterated. Mirabella Homeowners Association President John Guastella said when he drove around the community about 2 a.m., he thought he was getting a flat tire.
“What it was, I was driving over all the roof tiles,” he said.
A roof tile from one house blew off and became lodged in the wall of a neighbor’s house across the street.
As he cleaned up, Antonio Iribarren said the storm was “like a vacuum.” It picked up all his patio furniture and dumped i t b e t ween t wo houses. His rug ended up across the street.
“It was clearly a tornado.”
The National Weather Service agreed in its initial findings.
“Initial reports from survey team in Palm Beach, Juno Beach Damage was a high-end EF0 Tornado (8085mph),” a tweet from the agency’s Miami office said.
Trees broke off and went t hrough g a r a ge s . Others ended up in the community pool.
The Mirabella clubhouse was closed because of damage. Tennis courts and fencing were damaged. The wind picked up pool furniture from across the way and deposited it on the tennis courts.
The shade structure for a children’s playground was ripped off.
A trampoline ended up in a tree. Light fixtures and stop signs blew away.
Guastella said it was too soon to put an estimate on the damage or give a timeline for when the community would fully recover. But he said he hoped to have the trees cleaned up by the end of the day.
The HOA tries to budget for natural disasters through measures such as a landscape recovery fund, he said.
“We know it’s an eventualit y. In Florida, it’s going to happen,” Guastella said.