A Decade Later, Deadly Western Mass. Tornado Remembered As Rare Event That Pulled People Together

(Nancy Eve Cohen/NEPM)

Ten years ago this Tuesday, multiple tornadoes tore through western Massachusetts, killing three people, injuring 200, and causing more than $200 million in damages.

The most violent of the tornadoes touched down at 4:17 p.m. in Westfield, churning into West Springfield, then Springfield, leaving streets blanketed with rubble and broken glass, road signs twisted, entire sides of buildings sheared off, and roofs punctured or missing.

Marisol Mendez was working at Springfield Technical Community College that day, stripping and waxing floors. Although the safest place in a tornado is in the interior of a building in the basement, she and her co-workers first peered out big windows on the seventh floor to get a view .

“Like a big cloud! Going around and twirling and I said, ‘Oh wow! It’s going that way. It’s going towards where my mother is!'” she said.

Her mother lived in the South End near where the MGM casino would later be built.

Read the rest of the story at NEPM’s website.