WEST PALM BEACH — Beleaguered homeowners around Palm Beach Gardens are coping with some massive damage from a tornado that touched down on Wednesday.
The National Weather Service said it was an EF-3 tornado with wind speeds of up to 140 miles per hour.
Diana Nguyen was reduced to tears when speaking about the damage to her parents’ home near Palm Beach Gardens.
“We had the tornado landing on the roof and taking out winds and destroying everything in our yard. They grew trees here for the last 25 years and now everything is gone,” she told CBS News Miami. “We didn’t have insurance on the home and this is really devastating. There is so much work to be done and I am not sure what we are going to do.”
Next to her home, power lines were down and dozens of trees had been cut in half and there was debris everywhere.
She said her parents had decided to cancel their homeowner’s insurance.
“It got so expensive,” she said. “And they wouldn’t insure us because of our roof.”
She said that fortunately, some friends were helping with the cleanup in her neighborhood near the western edge of Palm Beach Gardens and near Loxahatchee.
“It’s terrible,” said Nguyen’s mother Bach. “I have never seen anything like this before.”
Palm Beach County authorities had said at least 200 homes were uninhabitable.
CBS News Miami spotted some dramatic images from Chopper 4, where we saw some mobile homes that had been destroyed and the roof of a Publix supermarket had been shredded.
Michele Crum said the tornado caused significant damage at the home that she has lived in for 10 years near Palm Beach Gardens: “I took note of the time it hit. It was 5:07 p.m. on Wednesday.”
“It was terrifying and scary,” she continued. “We took every precaution for a hurricane but obviously we were not prepared for a tornado. The shutters on my house all blew off. The windows were all blown in. I had a tree in one window and my front door caved in. Something got impaled in the front door. This was the scariest time of my life ever.”
Crum said that though she has been through a lot of hurricanes and grew up in tornado-prone Oklahoma, she had never been through one like this in her entire life.
“My roof is less than a month old and it has holes in it and it is leaking,” she said. “The fire rescue people helped secure it with a plastic cover so it follows codes. My detachable garage is blown apart but we are live by the grace of God. I really believe that and we just prayed out loud during a 5-to-10-second period and asked that he protect us.”
Not far away, Rahim Zaman was cleaning up after the tornado damage.
“Basically, the tiles came out of my roof,” he said.
