Amyrie Gilbert was stocking the drink cooler in the front of the Ace Hardware on Pontchartrain Boulevard in Slidell when the sky went dark Wednesday morning.
She heard what she described as a loud whistle that sounded “like a whip.” Then the windows started to rattle.
“That’s when my boss was like, ‘Run! Run!’” she said. She made it under her manager's desk, where she sheltered with four of her coworkers as the windows blew out. The sound of the glass shattering was “like the sound effects from a movie,” Gilbert said. And the wind was so strong it carried the cash register out into the parking lot.
A man makes a phone call near Ace Hardware on Pontchartrain Drive after an apparent tornado touched down in south Slidell, Wednesday, April 10, 2024. (Staff photo by Scott Threlkeld, The Times-Picayune)
Turns out Gilbert was in the path of "at least" an EF1 tornado, according to the National Weather Service, which caused extensive damage to businesses and homes along Pontchartrain Boulevard and Old Spanish Trail. Luckily, Gilbert and her coworkers were unharmed.
Across St. Tammany, residents huddled indoors as heavy rain pelted the parish and winds snapped trees and utility poles. Late Wednesday, more than 30,000 customers were still without electricity.
While damage was widespread, with “hundreds” of homes affected by the storms, Slidell bore the brunt of the destruction, Parish President Mike Cooper said. The weather service said survey crews will go out again Thursday to assess the tornado's path length, width and wind speeds.
“There are power lines still down all over the place,” said Slidell Police Chief Randy Fandal at a press conference on Wednesday evening.
“At one point there were over 30,000 people without power in St. Tammany Parish, many of those here in east St. Tammany,” Cooper said. “Cleco has indicated that it may take days to restore full power to all of these customers here in east St. Tammany Parish.”
A shelter will be open at Creekside Junior High School in Pearl River, where hot food will be available for residents who need it Thursday.
Across Pontchartrain Boulevard from the hardware store, the iconic golden arches from a McDonald’s restaurant were blown off their post and tossed clear across the four-lane roadway. The winds pushed a Ford pickup truck across a parking lot at the hardware store. And the metal roofing of a business next door was sheared off and found wrapped around several telephone poles a hundred yards away.
Grace Christian Center was damaged by an apparent tornado in south Slidell, Wednesday, April 10, 2024. (Staff photo by Scott Threlkeld, The Times-Picayune)
Next door to the hardware store, a hair salon called Nu’Me was turned inside out by the ferocious winds.
“My station was, like, right there,” said Essence Waller, 42, who works at the salon. All that remained was wooden debris, broken glass, and fluffs of building insulation. Her coworker’s salon chair had been blown out into the parking lot.
Waller said she was working on a client’s hair when the building started to vibrate. She and her client “took off to the back” of the shop, away from the windows.
“See all that stuff right there? It was on top of us. … The wall came down,” she said, pointing toward an area in the back of the shop where they took shelter. “We got into the corner. We were all in the fetal position until it passed over.”
In the end, everyone was, miraculously, OK.
“Praise God that there have been no fatalities so far,” said Chris Kaufmann, chief of St. Tammany’s Fire Protection District #1.
Cooper estimates that there are more than 100 damaged structures on the east side of the parish. Slidell Mayor Greg Cromer said he believed that between 50 and 75 of those were within Slidell’s city limits.
Less than a mile away, at the intersection of Old Spanish Trail and City Drive, the roof of the Courtney Heights apartment building was blown apart. Water leaked from the second floor of the two-story building down into the units on the first floor.
Eugene Hetler and son, Colin, outside the home in Slidell on Wednesday, April 10, 2024.
Outside, Eugene Hetler, 42, loaded two cases of water into his car, which had somehow gone unscathed. His home, however, was now uninhabitable. “We were all sleeping,” he said, when he was roused by a sound that he described as a “sonic boom.”
“It was like a blast noise. Kind of like a bomb, or a grenade,” he said. “And my ears popped.”
“You hear Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! with the windows shattering, and you hear the whole building shaking,” said Linda Williamson, one of Hetler’s neighbors.
Williamson hid with her wife and daughter in the bathroom and emerged to find a level of destruction she couldn’t believe. Water was pouring through her ceiling as she and her family scrambled to move their belongings out of the path of the leaks.
A car is is heavily damaged at McDonalds on Old Spanish Trail after an apparent tornado touched down in south Slidell, Wednesday, April 10, 2024. (Staff photo by Scott Threlkeld, The Times-Picayune)
“Most of it we lost,” she said, motioning around the dark apartment. Outside, Williamson’s car sat under a pile of bricks.
The family was already planning to move back to Indiana in July, in part because of their experiences dealing with hurricanes in Louisiana over the years. They now plan to leave this Saturday instead.
“We’re done, we can’t live here,” Williamson said.
