At a Glance
- A tornado in Deer Park, Texas, was rated EF3 by the National Weather Service.
- One resident sat in his car as the storm roared through.
- Nearby, a train was tipped over and homes and other buildings heavily damaged.
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Mark McVey pulled into his driveway in suburban Houston Tuesday afternoon right as a tornado roared through the area around him.
"I went to grab my coffee mug and my backpack and head back into the house to get back to work and I heard what I thought was hail on the car. Turns out it was debris," McVey said in a video interview Wednesday from his home in Deer Park, Texas.
He recorded the chaos around him for 46 seconds.
The wind howls. It seems to come from all directions.
(PHOTOS: Residents Work To Clean Up After Tornado Hits Houston Area)
All the while, McVey kept an eye on a nearby oak tree.
“I was dug down thinking, 'man if something lands on my car' … It was a moment I didn’t want to get caught in, but there I was," he said.
McVey's rising sense of concern can be heard on the video as he narrates, alone in his small Subaru sedan: “Oh guys … wow … wow … wow!”
On Wednesday, he recounted what was going through his mind as his car rocked back and forth.
“That (first) 'wow' was the recognition that this is a real weather event. I’m not at a good place," McVey said. “By that third ‘wow’ you could tell I really, I was pretty scared. I was really scared.”
When the wind started to calm, he made a run for the front door. Inside, his partner Lisa had hunkered down in a laundry room with their Maltese dogs.
"She was very, very shaken," McVey said. “I may have not realized the enormity of the possibility at the time, but she sure was in tune with it.”
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McVey's been through Hurricane Ike and Hurricane Harvey, and grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, where tornadoes are a way of life.
But he said he never experienced anything like Tuesday's storm.
“It just happened in an instant," McVey said.
The National Weather Service rated the tornado that moved through Deer Park, and nearby Pasadena, as an EF3 with peak winds estimated at 140 mph. It tore through a path 18 miles long and more than half a mile wide.
The storm was strong enough to blow over a train on railroad tracks about a mile from McVey's home. A house he had driven by just moments earlier was completely destroyed.
His own roof was damaged by a huge tree limb. But everything - and everyone - else at McVey's home was safe.
“I feel very fortunate to only have this much damage," he said.
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