SALEM, VA – “I looked over here and I could see debris just spinning in the air just like that, and I said ‘it’s a tornado,’” Allen McDaniel said.
Allen and Linda McDaniel have lived in Salem for decades - but tell 10 News a tornado was a first for them
“When you say tornado, you think, ‘oh you’re over exaggerating,’ but it was a tornado,” Allen said.
But they were just one of the families impacted on their street.
Next door, Josh Kingery told us what it was like watching the whole thing unfold outside his window.
“We were sitting there just watching it again, and then all of a sudden this large, large gust of wind started blowing everything around,” Kingery said.
His kids trampoline blew up and away from his house, and onto the power line outside of the McDaniel’s house.
But that wasn’t the worst of it for Kingery.
Both he and his daughter were hurt while trying to secure the canopy protecting their cars outside.
“The canopy came back towards me, it struck me and dragged me across the front yard,” he said.
Besides the trampoline, Kingery says the damage was minimal.
“We got pretty lucky,” he said.
And that was the sentiment across the whole neighborhood.
Trees are down, fences are broken, but spirits are still high.