Tornado tosses house into air, but teen safe in rubble and Heirsch worried the house could catch fire with the teenager inside. Not even the dispatcher could believe what he described, Heirsch said. “It's in the middle of the street?” Heirsch recounted
When a tornado touched down Tuesday night in Arabi, La., the growl of the twister and swirl of flying debris didn't last more than 15 seconds.
And then there was quiet.
“Within a split second there was nothing,” Chuck Heirsch, a resident since 2003, said.
Heirsch, 58, assessed the damage of his home before walking out to check on his neighbours. He could not believe what he was seeing.
“When I opened the (front door), the neighbour's house is in the street,” said Heirsch, a truck driver who first recounted the story to the Times-picayune/new Orleans Advocate.
The tornado that struck the east side of New Orleans that evening left thousands without power and at least one dead. It was strong enough that it rocked the foundation of Heirsch's neighbours' house and sent it flying toward the middle of Prosperity Street.
His neighbours, a woman identified by The Associated Press as Dea Castellanos and a man who lived with her, had made it out of the house unscathed, but their teenage daughter, who uses a wheelchair and was connected to a ventilator that night, was still trapped inside the house, Heirsch said. Castellanos's daughter, who has muscular dystrophy, wound up trapped in her bedroom yelling for help, the AP reported.
Castellanos told the wire service through an interpreter that as the tornado hit the ground, she felt the house spinning before it tossed her one-storey home about 30 feet from its lot, leaving it in the middle of the street.
“The wife was screaming frantically,” Heirsch told The Post. The man who lives with Castellanos had a flashlight, he added, and was “disoriented and screaming.”
Quickly, other neighbours came out to help the couple. Heirsch said he called 911 to ask for an ambulance and requested firefighters and the energy company. The pressure of the tornado had ruptured the home's gas pipe, which made a loud whistling sound,