Residents in Port St. Lucie were cleaning up Monday after a possible tornado or landspout tore through a neighborhood near Southbend Boulevard and Southeast Navy Ave on Sunday evening, leaving one homeowner with a backyard full of debris and damage. Aaron Christiansen said he was home around 6 p.m. when he looked out the window and saw dark clouds, white debris and, for a few seconds, something he thought might be birds.
Christiansen said the scene changed fast. He tried to hustle his dogs into his bedroom and take cover as the storm moved in, and he said he had about 10 seconds to react before it hit. By the time it was over, he said patio furniture had been pushed into his pool, the pool fence had been blown toward his home, plants were gone and debris was spread across the ground.
The storm is the kind of event that turns an ordinary evening into a cleanup the next morning. Christiansen said he and his family and pets were not injured, but the damage in his backyard was significant enough that he planned to begin cleanup efforts Monday and have his roof inspected. In a neighborhood hit by fast-moving wind and flying debris, that is the work that follows first: check the house, clear the yard and see what held up.
There is still one question that hangs over the damage. Christiansen and others were dealing with what looked like tornado-like weather, but the event had not been nailed down as a tornado or a landspout. Christiansen said he had seen similar weather before because he is originally from Minnesota, yet he also said the emergency alert reached him after the storm had already hit, a reminder that the warning came too late to help him change what happened in those first few seconds.
He said the only thing that mattered after that was that everyone made it through. The cleanup can wait for the details, but the next step is already clear: Monday is for clearing the debris, checking the roof and figuring out how much of the neighborhood was affected beyond one backyard.
