‘We’re the lucky ones’: Andover mom escapes with kids unscathed after tornado hits home
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Tornado cuts through Sedgwick County and Andover, Kansas
An EF-3 tornado touched down in south-central Kansas on April 29, 2022, leaving damage in its wake, but few injuries. Residents in the Wichita area, Andover and Sedgwick and Butler counties are picking up the pieces.
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Mandy Fouse was hanging out in the basement of her home on Friday evening with her 5-year-old son and 18-month-old daughter when she thought she heard tornado sirens.
Fouse, whose house is just southwest of the Andover YMCA in the Reflection Lake neighborhood, had her friend Bethany Reilly over. She asked her 5-year-old, Beckham, to turn the television down a little. Sure enough, she said, sirens.
“And then my son goes, ‘Oh look. It’s right there,’” she said.
The tornado was visible from her basement windows. It was about 8:15 p.m.
Late Friday night, Fouse and her kids were safe at her in-laws’ house near Pawnee and Andover Road, and she was nervously wondering what she’d find when she returns to her home in the morning.
Her house was hit by the tornado, she said, and all she knows for sure is that the windows are blown out, the fence is down and there’s a hole in the roof.
Though she hadn’t been able to see much coverage during the hectic hours after the tornado hit, she knows it could have been worse for her and her family.
“We’re probably the lucky ones,” she said. “Even with all our damage, we’re the lucky ones.”
Fouse said she usually puts her children to bed around 6:30 or 7 p.m., but she let them stay up on Friday. Their father, Caleb, was in Tulsa on a guy’s golf trip that he’d been planning for a year.
Once she saw the tornado out her back window, Fouse said, she dashed upstairs, grabbed her two terrier mixes, Lucy and Tebow, and returned to the basement, where everyone gathered in a back room.
“By the time we sat down, the lights went out, and that’s when it started to sound like a vacuum over the house,” she said. “The windows started breaking, and we started hearing things hit the house.”
Beckham was asking a million questions. His little sister, Parker, was crying.
Then, silence, Fouse said.
Both her father-in-law and father eventually made it through downed power lines to her house, she said, the latter insisting to emergency personnel that they must let him pass. The dads and Fouse put up some plastic on the windows, then the family rode back with Fouse’s father-in-law to his house. Though it’s only three miles away, the drive took 30 minutes.
Fouse said her husband immediately started making his way back from Tulsa once he heard.
As she left her neighborhood, Fouse said, it was pitch black, but she could see damage all around her. She said she was still in shock and about “two steps away from losing it.” But trying to respond to some of the 424 missed calls and text messages she’d received since the storm was keeping her distracted.
This isn’t the first time she’s tangled with a tornado, Fouse said. In the late 1990s, a tornado skirted her family’s house near Pawnee and Seneca, lifting the carport and throwing it into the back yard. During the big Haysville tornado of 1999, she was at softball practice when she heard the sirens, and her family drove home through the damage.
“Just don’t live next to me,” she said.
This story was originally published April 30, 2022 at 12:03 AM with the headline "‘We’re the lucky ones’: Andover mom escapes with kids unscathed after tornado hits home."
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