On March 2, 2012, a tornado hit the village of Moscow, Ohio. A look at how the residents fared:
At approximately 4:47 p.m., it hits the riverfront homes. In the first second, a tornado can break every window in a house. It rips shingles loose and pries the roof free, moving over it like air over a jet wing. With the windows now holes, the houses fill with wind. Roofs lift, exterior walls push outward, interior walls collapse. With nothing left to protect the structure, the tornado takes what’s inside—papers, furniture, tools, photographs, instruments, lamps, antique dressers, refrigerators, chairs, sofas, beds—and adds it to its growing, spinning wall.
On the riverfront, Linda Niehoff doesn’t hear the tornado the way almost everyone else will. It hits too fast for that. She is on the second floor of her large brick home, trying to get downstairs, when the lights go out. The tornado is here, she knows it; there’s no time to make it to the lower level so she dives into the bathroom, near an interior wall where the chimney comes up from the floor below. She crouches in a fireplace as the tornado demolishes her walls and roof, carrying away everything the floods hadn’t been able to over the last 214 years.
“This Beautiful, Sweet Little Town Is Just Gone.” — Jonah Ogles, Cincinnati Magazine