As John Hutchison was standing on top of what was left of his house located at 714 S. Francis in Picher, Okla., on Sunday, he was none to quick to thank his lucky stars just to be standing there.
The day after a strong tornado blew through the northeast Oklahoma town and wiped out over 20 blocks of houses, cleanup began and residents started to sift through what was left of their belongings.
“I just feel blessed,” said Hutchison.
On Sunday afternoon, officials confirmed that six had been killed in Picher with the possibility that another would be confirmed at a later time.
Hutchison was one of many left picking up the pieces after a storm ravaged parts of northeast Oklahoma, northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri, leaving 21 dead as of Sunday afternoon.
Right before the tornado came through, Hutchison was in the house with his family monitoring the storm on television.
“There were five of us — me, my wife, our daughter and our two granddaughters — and we knew that we were under a tornado watch,” Hutchison said. “Our granddaughter Tressie was looking out the back window in the laundry room and said that she thought there was a tornado on the other side of the big chat pile.”
At that point, Hutchison looked to the west and saw something he could not believe.
“I looked at it for a few seconds and then I could see it rotating and it was wider than the pile over there ... it was a huge, black monster coming right at us,” Hutchison said. “I said ‘It is a tornado and we need to run and hide.’”
At that point, Hutchison and his five family members huddled on the floor inside a closet in a bedroom.
“It was not just a few seconds from when we all got in the closet that we started to feel the house moving,” Hutchison said. “The walls started leaning back towards us and you could hear all the popping and crackling.”
As it came through their house, the tornado took them, still in the closet, 70 feet, to rest next to a tree outside their house.
“Everyone of us walked out alive,” Hutchison said.
The house Hutchison lived in for 19 years, however, was a total loss, as was vehicles that were outside of the house.
So Sunday, much like his neighbors, Hutchison spent the day going through the remains of his house while his wife, Joan, was being checked out in a Tulsa hospital with a cracked rib and a bruised lung.
