DATE=04/30/02

TYPE=INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

TITLE=MURRAY LEVY-Tornadoes

NUMBER=3-158

BYLINE=TERRY WING

DATELINE=WASHINGTON

INTERNET=

/// Editors: This interview is available in Dalet under SOD/English News Now Interviews in the folder for today or yesterday ///

INTRO: Tornado-ravaged cities from Missouri to Maryland are picking up the pieces after an unusually potent batch of storms plowed across the eastern half of the United States Sunday. At least six people were killed, including three people in a hard-hit area of Maryland south of Washington, D-C. The tornado that hit La Plata, Maryland was a killer storm and Charles County Commissioner Murray Levy (Lee vee) was a witness to its destruction...

MR. LEVY: It was Sunday evening, and I was home. My wife and I were on the back porch. And it gets very dark. And the winds pick up, and there was this low rumble that quickly rose in crescendo to a roar. People describe it as a freight train; I don't think that quite does justice to it. I mean, it is just an ungodly loud rumble. And my wife and I ran inside, grabbed the dog, and ducked into a closet. The storm passed very quickly. And then, when we came out, our damage was very light -- tree limbs and things like that. But I knew this was unusual, and I got in the car to go to the county emergency center. And when I went through the neighborhood behind us, it was immediately evident. I mean, homes were literally flattened, people were stumbling around, and we began to organize a search of the homes.

The amazing thing -- and this kind of damage went on for several miles -- at the end of the day, two people were killed. And if you see the damage up close, you would have thought hundreds of people would have been killed. Not that losing two citizens is not a tragedy, but given the level of the damage, I think everybody is surprised that there weren't more people killed. We had about 95 injured. They've all been treated. Some more serious, but none critical. And people walked out of these homes, after they were flattened, people were dug out of these homes and out of these buildings, and they survived. And that, to me, is a miracle and one of the brighter sides of this whole affair.

MR. WING: From a personal and, I presume, an emotional standpoint, as you went around the county today, how did it strike you?

MR. LEVY: People's spirits are remarkably high. There is no "woe is me" attitude, which is one of the things about Americans that I've always found appealing. We're not a kind of people that in times of crisis feel sorry for ourselves. We tend to get moving. And the people here are no different. They're cleaning up. They're trying as best they can to locate personal belongings.

There is a sense of shock. I don't think anybody here has seen anything like this before. It looks like a war-torn area. It's like the villages you see on television, with houses just flattened, debris everywhere, wires down, electricity off, roofs missing off of buildings. It's just incredibly surreal.

OUTRO: Charles County Commissioner Murray Levy. He spoke with News Now's Terry Wing. Under the so-called Fujita scale, the tornado that La Plata, Maryland was an F5 -- with winds between 400 and 500 kilometers per hour. It is the first of that strength to ever hit Maryland.

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