JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Like the sign on her wall that reads “In everything, give thanks”, Maggie Alvarado is thankful.
“I’m so grateful, I remember being in the closet calling my daughter and my son in law saying take shelter, take shelter,” she describes.
She and one of her daughters were sitting in their living room near Goodby's Creek when they started getting emergency alerts on their phones on Wednesday.
“Thank God we listened,” she says.
They got in the closet with their dogs and seconds later they heard a roar outside.
“Then the air felt like it got sucked out and we heard the windows breaking and we stayed in the closet until we got the all clear. Then we came out and found the damages,” Alvarado says.
The window behind the couch where they had been sitting was shattered.
“Glass on the carpet and you couldn’t even see it because the glass was all over,” she explains.
Tree limbs had been hurled into the house and a piece of wood impaled in the side of her home. She says her backyard is a mix of debris from her home and her neighbors and trees that snapped. The home behind her sustained major damage, but she says no one was home at the time.
Her message to others is simple.
“When the city and state, they send those alerts- listen,” tells Alvarado,” I believe those alerts saved our lives, I really do.”
The National Weather Service confirmed a tornado struck part of Southside Jacksonville which is near Goodby's Creek.
Thursday morning, a storm survey team in Duval County preliminarily assigned an EF-1 rating to the tornado that moved across Philips Highway just west of I-95 Wednesday afternoon. That means the tornado's winds were between 86 and 110 miles per hour.