SANDERSON — A tornado tore into a small subdivision just west of Sanderson Sunday evening around 7:20 p.m., critically injuring a Border Patrol agent before bouncing through the city’s downtown and destroying at least two historic buildings.
“About a block before hitting me, it kind of retreated a bit upwards so the vortex point of it was not touching the ground, and I think that’s what saved me because it just leap-frogged over my building,” said Mike Green, an architect who has been restoring the Sanderson State Bank building in the path of the tornado. “Then it touched down again and just continued to tear up buildings.”
Sanderson is the Terrell County seat — 54 miles east of Marathon and 65 miles south of Fort Stockton — with a population of about 740.
While many who watched videos of the funnel moving through the desert described it as beautiful, the destruction the tornado wreaked on Sanderson was anything but. Ferguson Motors, a coffee shop, eatery and event space housed in a historic car dealership building, received heavy damage throughout the establishment but particularly in the event space in the back that lost most of its roof. The business also housed art and other items for sale, much of it destroyed. A GoFundMe has been set up to help the business get running again.
Jake Harper, who owns Ferguson Motors with his wife Hannah Harper, said their business had become the hub of social life in town, so they are definitely going to rebuild. He said most upsetting was the loss of so much creative work shown in the building by local artists. “There is artwork everywhere, sitting in water, thrown out, sucked out of the building, broken, damaged, destroyed everything,” he said. “We’ve had a handful of artists reach out and say, ‘We’re not worried about our art. We don’t even want to get paid for our art. Keep the money and help fix your building.’ We’ve had artists reaching out about potentially helping with some kind of fundraiser. None of the artists are upset, but we’re upset that a lot of these people’s livelihood was blown out the window, literally.”
Green said witnesses saw the tornado descend off the canyon and hit the Lomita Terrace subdivision near the Border Patrol station before heading east toward downtown. “There’s one house that’s almost completely gone,” Green said. “It just beat them up bad.”
Green and Terrell County Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland said two other downtown historic buildings were clearly destroyed — an adobe former railroad building and a wood-frame bunkhouse that was used by workers for overnights long ago when Sanderson was a railroad town.
Cleveland told The Big Bend Sentinel that the injured Border Patrol agent was in his mobile home when it took a direct hit by the tornado. He was airlifted to Odessa with multiple injuries — including a broken femur, other broken bones, skull fractures and internal bleeding. He is in stable condition after surgery last night, Cleveland said. A woman was airlifted to El Paso with a serious broken arm, and 10 others were injured but treated locally. Cleveland said at this point the town has been inundated with resources and volunteers, so nothing specifically is needed at this time.
“The weather has just been very humid this past couple of weeks,” Cleveland said. “Every day in the afternoon we’re having these storms develop throughout West Texas. When we get rain, we get excited, and we get out, and we watch it come down, and we’re out on the porch.” But Cleveland said after getting an alert for a tornado watch, he started looking for signs of a twister and launched his drone. “And then I was just watching, and once I saw it hit town, of course, I dropped my [drone] remote and picked up my other phone and then got my keys to get mobile to see where we could start helping.”
The Ferguson Motors fundraiser can be found at: https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-with-sanderson-rebuild-ferguson-motors.
