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Student Recalls Walls Shaking In Tornado

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By GEORGE WILKENS, The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 20, 2008

PLANT CITY - When sirens blared near Union University on Feb. 5, sophomore Joe Mendolia assumed it was another routine warning of potentially severe weather.

Minutes later, the 20-year-old student from Plant City survived a tornado that injured 51 classmates, hospitalized nine and destroyed much of the Jackson, Tenn., campus.

It was just after dinner when a security guard ushered Mendolia and 20 others from the cafeteria lobby into the comparative safety of an adjacent windowless chapel. Still not taking the warning seriously, Mendolia telephoned Plant City and jokingly told his mother, "I'm probably not going to see you again."

Soon, after the guard ordered everyone to the floor, Mendolia realized a tornado was imminent.

"Our ears just popped. That's when everyone started bawling their eyes out," he recalled during his recent visit to Plant City. "And you could just hear the windows blowing out" of the building.

"The walls were shaking for about three minutes. We were all praying louder than you ever heard a group of college kids pray before," Mendolia said.

He and the others emerged from the chapel to discover shattered glass everywhere. Furnishings, bulletin boards and other debris littered the floors.

Mendolia escaped injury in the 7 p.m. twister, but his dormitory in the nearby Watters Residential Complex was among the most heavily hit.

"It's gone. We have one wall left," he said of his dorm room on the upper floor of the two-story building. Mendolia's personal property in the room was destroyed or swept away by the wind. "All I had was the clothes on my back," he said, adding that 80 percent of the rooms in the college dorms were destroyed.

His car - among the hundreds on campus destroyed - was hurled 600 to 700 feet by the twister. "You could tell by the shape it had flipped over several times," apparently blown through or above a cluster of trees, Mendolia said. The 2006 Suzuki, a gift for his 2006 graduation from Plant City High, has been replaced by a 2008 model, thanks to insurance money.

Mendolia, a music education major and Phi Mu Alpha fraternity member, returned to Plant City during the unscheduled break in classes following the storm. Classes resume this week.

Most of the university's 2,600 students live on the western Tennessee campus, about 85 miles from Memphis. The 1,100 displaced by the storm will be housed temporarily at a church-owned hotel, with staff members or in off-campus housing students secured.

Mendolia and his roommates are among the 300 students assigned to the former Old English Inn, which Englewood Baptist Church has turned over to the university for use through December.

Mendolia said those wishing to contribute to rebuilding his school, the nation's oldest Southern Baptist university, may send a donation to 1050 Union University Drive, Jackson TN 38305.

Reporter George Wilkens can be reached at (813) 865-4433 or gwilkens@tampatrib.com.

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