Palm Beach County officials say Wellington is the hardest hit area after tornadoes brought in by Hurricane Milton flipped cars and completely leveled at least one home. NBC6’s Bri Buckley reports.
The neighborhood is a wreck. A house is leveled, and trees pulled up from the roots.
Neighbors in Wellington in Palm Beach County are still shaken by the tornado that ripped through the area with the winds of Hurricane Milton on Wednesday afternoon. And in Palm Beach Gardens, a Publix under construction could be seen with a collapsed roof.
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An official storm assessment to determine the strength of the storm is still pending.
On Thursday, emergency crews helped the hardest-hit community search for belongings amid debris. Two cars were flipped over, trailers thrown from one yard to the next, ripped to shreds and homes destroyed.
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Multiple people were injured and some had to be taken to the hospital, but no deaths have been reported there.
Cell phone video captured the twister that terrified one young resident.
"I didn't really know what it was, so I was thinking, was it like a tornado or something like that?" Liam said. "I thought I might die."
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Liam and his family got the warning, rushing to hide in their home. Minutes later, they came out and saw the destruction.
"All of a sudden, the power started flickering, and you just heard this sound. It just kept getting louder and louder and louder," Bryan Schultz, whose home was destroyed, said. "And they’re not lying when they say it sounds like a freight train because that’s exactly what it sounded like."
Schultz said their entire property was completely destroyed.
Mandy Erhardt is just thankful they’re all alive.
"I have to pack up my stuff and find a place to live for the next few weeks or months," Mandy Erhardt said. "We're all safe. Nobody got hurt."
Schultz's voice breaks as he says: "What am I going to do? No truck, no place to go."
This area of Wellington is packed full of horse farms all next to each other, left to clean up the mess as they try to salvage their businesses.
'You don’t want human loss of life, [or] injuries to animals or injuries to infrastructure, so you have to move the animals and get them to some other place, and the cost is catastrophic," resident James Ritter says.
