Austin American-Statesman from Austin, Texas • 20

A20 Sunday, June 1, 1997 'TX SAYING GOODBYE Austin American-Statesman i (...) Ted S. Warren photosAA-S Above, a tornado cut a narrow streak from the sky as it touched ground Tuesday along Interstate 35 just north of Jarrell, minutes before the deadly storm swept through the Double Creek Estates subdivision, right. Drama of disaster reveals Jarre All iJ I .1 I' II 14U UJ "1 1 i I Sorrow and pain are shared as town tries to grasp the inexplicable Continued from Al and radios to hear those staccato bulletins coming out of the National Weather Service. The flare-ups "tornadic cells" in me- teorological lingo started erupting up and down Interstate 35, starting near Waco, 60 miles north of here. Charlie Boren was taking a nap.

Bud Taylor was behind the bar at the Speedway Inn, and he and his wife, Betty, decided they'd better go hide in the bathroom. Larry Hausenfluke, Jarrell's superintendent of schools, was huddled under Rancher Byron Goode got in his pickup and headed south. The Ruiz boys, John and Michael, knew that their mobile home was unsafe in a tornado, and so they got on their bikes and headed over to their family friends, the Moehrings. The control of nature is beyond the V. realm of human possibility, but we keep Ralph BarreraM-S A from going crazy by clinging to the belief thnt hppnnspnnrhnmesnnri families werp safe yesterday and the day before, they will 9 be so when we return tonight and tomorrow and the day after that.

We negotiate a bargain with nature, settling for shelter in A the absence of perfect, complete, unat A solitary driver maneuvers a truck cautiously through a stoplight off Interstate 35 North between Round Rock and Georgetown as blinding rains and winds whip the street lights around on their wires. tainable safety We assume everything will be fine, because we have to in order to get through the day And every once in a while, nature breaks its part of the deal. for survivors. A volunteer firefighter arrived at what was once somebody's house and said, "We know there's supposed to be a lady here with a little girl." Hausenfluke spent some time at the site, then went back to the office and told his secretary the school would have to stay open. Jaroszewski, who works part-time as a security guard at the Wal-Mart Superstore in Round Rock, called the night manager for help with supplies around 4:30 p.m.

He got the run of the store: "I took a whole truckload of meat and cheese to make sandwiches out there," Jaroszewski said. Relief agencies and the national media were all heading for the town of what had been something more than 400 souls. It stopped raining, it started getting dark, and the grim work continued into the night. Infrared cameras to be used in the search for survivors arrived, along with hundreds of dollars' worth of donated batteries to run them. Jaroszewski: "All we found was dead cows, dead horses and dead people.

As you looked and found more and more bodies, you just said, 'Isn't this Wednesday After death and sadness and mayhem on such a scale, can anything be taken for granted? Can you believe that the world makes sense at all, that the sun will even come up the next day? To anyone coming in from the east before dawn, Jarrell looked utterly at peace. It slept to the song of truck tires up and down the interstate. But on the west side, where a rural neighborhood was supposed to be, there was yellow tape and a whole lot of men and women with badges, bright lights running on mobile generators. The mission was changing, from rescuing survivors to recovering the scattered remains of the dead. At Doc's One Stop, which was flattened in the last tornado, the one in May of '89, folks started turning out after a night of unrestful sleep or no sleep at all, looking for coffee and community.

At 9 a.m., Joe Hoes and his wife Louise were cooking up barbecue not to sell to the lunch regulars, but to repay the community that helped them rebuild after their home was destroyed in the last one. "It's hard to start over; I don't think I could if I had to again," said Hoes, 55. "I wouldn't have a house if I didn't have friends." The Salvation Army was in front of the Fire Department, the Red Cross at the school, the Baptists next to the Baptist church. None of the suddenly homeless needed to sleep at the school Tuesday night, because they had friends or family nearby There was a message board, a safe list, bags and boxes of clothing and supplies. At midday, bad news was dispensed, privately, at the First Baptist Church, which lost 10 percent of its congregation.

Gov. George Bush came in a helicopter and landed in the schoolyard at noon after flying over the destruction zone. He visited a flock of people at the school. "You got you a summer haircut, don't you?" he asked a crewcut kid. He thanked the Boy Scouts for being there.

He told the homeless he sure was sorry. He stepped outside, made a statement to the press pack and signed a disaster proclamation for Williamson County. Then he stepped back inside for some more talk with the locals and worked his way toward the back door to the chopper. The National Weather Service confirmed Continued on next page 'That sky was black as night, just boiling. Like a dad-gum big bull getting ready to charge.

Bud Taylor J-if The siren at the volunteer fire department, with the Christmas star affixed to its tower, started blaring. Later, around 3:15 p.m., the storm, shuffling along at a leisure-fi' ly 20 mph, announced itself at the northwest edge of town. 3 A corpulent twister or twins, or six, nobody knows for sure yet dropped out of the clouds. "That sky was black as night, just boil-V ing," Bud Taylor said. "Like a dad-gum big bull getting ready to charge.

Seemed like it set there for 10 minutes making up its mind which way to go." When it passed them, Bud and Betty came out of the bathroom and started setting up beers for rattled residents. Hausenfluke: "That tornado moved slower and stayed over people longer than any one I'd ever seen before. That tornado sat on the ground here for a full 15 or 20 min--1 utes. It was slow-moving but powerful." At 3:30 p.m., Williamson County Con-z stables Gary Griffin and Dennis Jaroszews-i ki blocked off northbound 1-35 just south of town. There was heavy hail and multi-" pie tornado sightings, ri Joe Hoes of Joe's Country Barbecue, on i the east side of the interstate, saw a funnel 1 cloud approach his home before splitting into two storm clouds the larger one headed west Boren was still asleep.

His girlfriend, Diane Howell, had headed off to the beans' ty shop a few minutes earlier, but she -f turned around toward the storm to A' get Boren out. The car was moving when his butt hit the passenger seat. J-' The thing came down a gentle slope toward Double Creek Estates and the area 9- around it and dropped, sucking the vegetation out of the ground. It ripped a long section of asphalt out of the road into i town. Then it brought death.

On one side of Keith Jones, district manager of Albertson's in Austin, takes pictures of what is left of the company's Cedar Park store Saturday. The building sustained severe damage Tuesday when a tornado cut a path through the store, caving in the roof and leaving several people injured. Tom LankesiAA-S i County Road 305, people died. On the other, tween $10 million and $20 million. survivors opened their eyes to see sky people merely thought they would.

The twister unloaded most furiously on where the ceiling was supposed to be. Much later, when the was time for a stretch of land about nine-tenths of a The area was sealed off. Griffin and counting, these were the Of the mile long, but it moved along for miles far- Jaroszewski got there just after 4 p.m,, and neighborhood's 131 residents, 27 were dead, ther south. Driving rain came behind it, soon it looked like everybody in Central Some 50 homes destroyed. Damage be- and then the emergency crews.

Huddled Texas with a uniform was there, looking i.