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The
residents of Eagle
Pass had no warning that a tornado was approaching around 7:00
on the evening of April 24, 2007. The town of twenty-six thousand
residents about 150 miles southwest of San
Antonio on the Mexican border had no siren system and no television
station. Managers of the cable provider and the largest Spanish language
radio station in town said that they never received the two tornado
warnings that the National Weather Service Office in New
Braunsfel issued that evening.
The storm struck Piedras
Negras on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande then rolled into
the Rosita Valley community of Eagle
Pass. Winds estimated at eighty to one hundred miles per hour
and golf ball-size hail preceded the twister. Ricardo Tijenna said
he saw the clouds rolling in but thought it was just a typical spring
storm. He and his six children escaped by huddling together under
a bed in their house near the center of the damage. Some of his neighbors
were not as fortunate. A family of five, including a five-year-old
child, died when the tornado flung their mobile home into the Rosita
Valley Elementary School. Two others died when their houses collapsed
around them. The tornado destroyed the elementary school, two churches,
and eighty homes. Seventy-six homes were heavily damaged. The National
Weather Service rated the tornado an EF3 with winds estimated between
135 and 165 miles per hour.
© Marlene
Bradford
May 8 , 2015 guest column
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