Immediate aftermath

Once Associate Headmaster John Ashton was certain his family was safe and their home was unharmed, he headed to campus within half an hour of the storm passing through.

The night of the tornado, Eugene McDermott Headmaster David Dini and Director of Experiential Education Mark Sullivan were in New Orleans on an accreditation trip at the Isidore Newman School. Texting with Ashton, Dini received word that the tornado had hit campus.

Ashton: My headlights hit what was the gym and illuminated the fact that there were no walls on the east and west side. It was so vivid and visceral, where I knew we had a significant issue. That was the first moment of real understanding of what the impact was.

Dini: I saw the first picture of the gym. Then I knew it was really, really bad. I immediately rang up Mr. Sullivan. I had already gotten on my Southwest app and saw that there was a 6 a.m. flight back to Dallas. I called him and said, ‘change your return ticket to the flight tomorrow. Let’s meet in the lobby at 4 a.m.’

Ashton: I put the car in park, and I called my wife, and I said, ‘I’m okay. I made it to school, but I’m going to be here a while. There are some things I want to check on.’ I wanted to find Daniel Mauch, our (night shift) security guard.

Mauch: When the tornado hit the gym, I was in the security office (located on the north side of Hicks Gym), and I heard a jumbo-jet engine going through the building. A few minutes later, I took out a flashlight, went outside, and looked around. All the lights were out on the property.

Ashton found Mauch soon after reaching the property. The two men, along with others who made their way to campus, stayed through the night to examine the damage. Yet it wasn’t until the light of day that the full extent of the destruction was revealed.

Ashton: We just started walking around campus, trying to inventory where the impact has been. We went into every building, found what was leaking, what was penetrated, where the roofs were gone, where the bricks had fallen off.

Mauch: I walked out and saw all the buses stacked up on top of each other and looking at my poor little vehicle, a couple tennis courts over, flattened. I thought to myself, “How do I get home now?”

Ashton: Mark Webb, our director of the maintenance facilities, had already put a call to a company that does water remediation. They actually sent team members out that night, around midnight, and, by sunrise, we had a whole army coming to get started right away with cleanup. We were fortunate that we had Beck construction here, and they had just finished the Winn Science Center. They were still here with us, working through a punch list of items, finalizing things. They moved from a construction position to a cleanup and repair position.

Dini: We got in a car early that morning, got to the airport and took off, landed at Love Field about 7 a.m. Mrs. Sullivan picked us up, and at that point you could still get into the neighborhood early that Monday morning. There were some trees down in the backyard and of course, no power. We came onto campus through the back. We could immediately see how bad it was. There were limbs, debris everywhere through the quad. Pretty much all the trees at the other end of the quad were gone or just mangled. All the brick from the bell tower had come down. The roofs were all torn back.

Sean Lissemore, Athletic Director: I parked a couple blocks away, so I walked towards campus and I saw Hicks Gym, and I saw our transportation fleet on its side all over campus. I saw the damage, and it took a while for it to sink in. It was unbelievable for a guy that grew up in New Jersey because I wasn’t exposed to tornadoes like this. It really was a concerning time, and my concern was for everyone around us in this community to make sure that they were OK.

Dini: What immediately was going through my mind was, it’s going to take a long time to get back on campus. And I’m thinking to myself, ‘where do we even begin?’

Dave Carden, creative director: The first part was just straight-up communications. You know, school is not going to happen, yeah, so we had to figure out, what do we tell people? How do we tell them? What’s the message? And then all kinds of ancillary events are affected by a school closure.

Dini: Our fire safety systems, our central fire alarm system, was based in Hicks, so that was actually one of the final things that was going to hold us up from reopening, because you can’t open a campus if you don’t have fire safety systems. They had to cut out concrete. We were somewhat contingent upon outside vendors to come help us do some of these things.