Talk about a close call.
Frightening video shot last Thursday by a North Carolina man shows the harrowing moments a tornado passed dangerously close by.
Sam Smith, a 43-year-old father of three, was driving down an Illinois Interstate when he was stopped by the sight of a gigantic tornado headed toward him.
“This is a tornado,” he said in the video. “And I cannot tell which way it is going, so I don’t know how to get away from it. But it looks like it’s coming right towards me.”
Smith’s assessment of the direction of the angry, swirling funnel was correct and he decided to back up under a nearby overpass.
He said he never received an alert or heard anything on the radio about the tornado.
In just a few moments the tornado rumbled by in front of Smith’s pickup.
“That is scary,” said Smith as debris flew all around him. “The truck feels like it’s about to lift up off the ground.”
Although he sounded calm, Smith later told the Chicago Tribune that he was “freaking out inside.”
He described getting ready for debris to crash through his windshield or for his truck to get flipped over.
“I thought, ‘I’m about to get blown away.’ I remember thinking to myself, ‘I’m seat belted in. That’s about as good as it’s going to get for me at this point,’” he told the newspaper.
Amazingly, Smith and his pickup truck escaped unscathed, save for some paint that peeled off his truck.
Last week, tornadoes in Illinois, including a massive twister travelling at up to 200 mph, levelled the town of Fairdale and killed two women.
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