South Central Texas is still bearing the brunt of a rare July cold front that sent powerful storms barrelling across the state. In the wake of flooding rains, a tornado touched down in San Antonio, striking fear into the heart of one onlooker.
Mario Ytuarte was parked in his F-150 near The Rock at La Cantera, waiting to take a long-haul drive to Houston for work on Wednesday morning, July 15. After hours of rain and storms, the unexpected happened: the skies calmed, the rain stopped and the world grew eerily quiet. That’s when he says he knew something was wrong.
He’d seen the movie Twister and knew this wasn’t a good sign. He looked to his left, and what he saw sent panic through his heart.
“I rolled down my window, and I looked to my left,” Ytuarte tells MySA from a parking lot at The RIM shopping center, surrounded by wreckage. “There was the tornado right there — just twisting and turning and stuff flying everywhere.”
He rolled up his window and “hauled butt” to his friend’s apartment to take cover in a parking garage. That’s where he stayed until the coast was clear.
While he had made it to safety, this was a first-time weather phenomenon for him. The fear lingered from the confines of the concrete garage.
“I was panicking, and I was nervous. I’ve never been in a tornado,” Ytuarte recalled. “I’ve never been in that before, and especially here in San Antonio. I grew up here and never experienced a tornado. I was in awe, and it was just crazy.”
Once he knew it was safe, Ytuarte gathered his family and went to see the path of destruction left by the tornado. While roaming The RIM, the impact on local business was apparent.
Smaller businesses had smashed windows, signs torn from rock facades, overturned patio furniture and decorations and metal fencing toppled and bent — an indication of the sheer strength of the winds that howled through the popular shopping center. The Santikos Palladium theater had piles of rubble on its front steps where decorative columns were tattered and ceiling and facade pieces were ripped apart. Though the San Antonio theater company is making haste with repairs, it is vowing to be operational again by Thursday.
The Marshalls at the shopping center had broken and missing letters, and the interior doors and ceiling tiles were taken down. The Tribute at The RIM apartments was battered by tornado winds. From the outside, the damage seemed minor, with fallen trees and torn signs. But inside the complex, apartments facing the pool had windows and doors smashed, with debris scattered throughout the typically luxurious setting.
“When I saw that, that put the fear of God in my heart,” Ytuarte said. “I was in a big truck, a Ford F-150, [but] I still felt scared.”