MICHELLE WILLARD
Posted: Sunday, April 12, 2009 7:58 am

Like most of Rutherford County’s school children, Rick and Kim Lane’s two teenagers were home for Good Friday.

DEERFIELD – Like most of Rutherford County’s school children, Rick and Kim Lane’s two teenagers were home for Good Friday.

Son William, 17, knew exactly what to do when the tornado struck.

He ushered his sister, Karolyn, 14, and his girlfriend into the bathroom. He grabbed cushions from the couch, put the girls in the bathtub and laid down on top of them until the storm past.

“They did the drill just perfectly,” Rick said, still dressed in his Army fatigues after being called back from an impending Iraq deployment with the National Guard to check on his family.

The tornado ripped the roof from the family’s home at the corner of Gresham Lane and Doe Drive in the Deerfield subdivision. It overturned a car in the driveway and slammed it into the front porch. It ripped the house to shreds, but left the bathroom where the teens hid intact.

“Everything is still hanging on the wall. There’s not a scratch,” Kim said about the bathroom, adding the hallway right outside is a different story with mud, leaves and debris covering the walls.

“This is all irrelevant,” Kim said, pointing back at the house where she has lived with her family for 23 years and raised four children.

“They’re not hurt. We can replace stuff, but God took care of them,” she said through tears. “God put angels around them and protected them.”

The Lane’s neighbor Patrick Smith was just as protected as he took cover in the bathroom with his Jack Russell terrier.

“I’ve been through a lot of things, but nothing like this,” Smith said, adding he is glad his children were at their mother’s home when the tornado hit.

The tornado tore Smith’s roof from his house, exposing the second floor and attic.
Glenn Bolge’s home a block away on Spike Lane was in similar shape. The tornadic winds ripped the roof off his back patio and punched a hole in the front of his house.
Bogle was watching weather updates in his living room when he heard the wind.
When he grabbed his dog, he saw rain falling sideways in the gusts.

“I threw the dog in the hall closet and tried to go in after him, but the wind sucked the door knob out of my hand,” he recalled. He fell it the closet and held his pet until the storm passed.

“It only lasted five to 10 seconds,” he said. Everything in his house was destroyed except his big-screen television, which wasn’t even knocked from its stand, he said.

RIVERVIEW – Chris Bloebaum was keeping an eye on the weather when the tornado passed over the Riverview subdivision off Thompson Lane.

“It sounds like a freight train. You can hear it,” he said.

Bloebaum took cover with his dog in a closet in his Riverview Drive home.

He said it only lasted a few seconds, but then suddenly he was covered in insulation as the tornado passed and shredded his roof.

“And then I was looking at the sky through the ceiling in the room I was in,” he said.
His neighbors were also protected.

Bloebaum said his elderly neighbor sat through the tornado in a recliner in his living room. Because a recent hip surgery, the neighbor couldn’t take cover.

“Surprisingly with all this,” Bloebaum said pointing to the destruction on his street, “everybody was OK.”

Storm victim Beverly Calder survived by hiding under the stairs when the storm ripped apart her Riverview home.

She is grateful to all the friends, family and volunteers who turned out to lend a hand.
“We’ve got people we don’t even know helping,” she said. “More than anything it’s people trying to help.”