1987 Saragosa remembers

Residents reflect on tornado’s devastation and the long, painful road to recovery

Greg Harman
Odessa American

SARAGOSA — The faded U.S. flag tacked up inside Candela’s Grocery in Saragosa is torn and thin. A discarded electric clock in the corner — its hands frozen in time — serves as an eternal reminder of the destruction that came from the sky more than a decade ago.

Twelve years ago, the name Saragosa became linked forever with one of the worst tornadoes of the century, a natural disaster that took 30 lives as it leveled the town.

Today, the small agricultural community has settled back into its obscurity, the half-stocked shelves at the local grocery layered in dust.

Shop owner Jose Candela’s tired face tightens as he discusses the events of May 22, 1987, events that shaped the personality of Saragosa.

"Here we have a misery cancer," Candela said. "There is no remedy for that."

The electric clock in Candela’s Grocery reads 8:17. It was running a few minutes slow that Friday evening when the storm came.

Across the street, many residents had gathered in the Catholic Hall of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church to celebrate the graduation of area preschoolers.

At Candela’s Grocery, Jose Candela was observing the worsening weather from the front of his store.

"I was outside by the post, and I saw the clouds — a big one — pieces of clouds spinning."

As Candela recalled the event, he spun his arms wildly, recreating the motion of the monstrous funnel cloud.

"Then I saw the (rain) go right this way," he said, as his hands flashed horizontally before his face. "I told everyone here, I told my wife, get the family and run away from here. Everybody say, ‘That man is crazy.’ "

Unfortunately, Candela was not mistaken about the danger.

Midway through the graduation, a young man burst into the auditorium and grabbed his son from the stage, Joey Herrera recalled.

The frantic intruder alerted the gathering that a tornado had been spotted in Balmorhea — just a few miles southwest of Saragosa, Herrera said.

That was when the group made "the worst decision we could have made," he said.

In the few minutes the audience had before the funnel cloud reached Saragosa, the group decided to shelter in the hall.

"We probably had time to get out, but we thought we would be safer if we stayed where we were," Herrera lamented.

With crowds huddling in anticipation inside the ground-level community center, the tornado struck the building with fantastic force. The thick, cement walls crumbled, trapping many beneath the rubble.

Candela remembered watching one family run and hide beneath a bridge while he dashed to his car to alert other residents of the danger.

His car was blown from the highway onto a ranch road, and then back onto the highway, he said.

Candela found shelter inside a nearby cotton gin, where glass from the wind-struck windows was blowing violently in the air.

When the winds finally stopped and he crawled from his hiding place, the town he had known was gone. Chaos and destruction had taken its place.

The excavation of Catholic Hall, reduced in minutes to a pile of rubble, lasted long into the following day, said Reeves Precinct 3 County Commissioner Herman Tarin.

"I ran back eight miles to get a front-end loader to pick up pieces of the cement wall," Tarin said. But as the machine began to manipulate the slabs of concrete, he said the screams of those trapped inside made it hard to continue the search.

"I remember those screaming, ‘Hey! You’re hurting me!’ when I moved the concrete," he said.

Herrera was one of those trapped beneath the tons of concrete. He had huddled on the floor of the hall with his 25-year-old wife and 1-year-old son, as had many others. He was the only one of the three to survive.

The bordering schoolhouse and more than half of the town were demolished by the tornado.

According to Red Cross records 162 were injured and 30 lost their lives.

As dawn broke that Saturday, the rising sun revealed the incredible ironies that have come to define tornado strikes.

At the center of the tabernacle of the otherwise devastated church stood two statues: one of the Blessed Heart of Jesus and one of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the church’s namesake. Both were unscathed.

Down the road, one of many homes lay flattened. In the center of the wreckage stood a lone, wooden table offering a plain, unfrosted birthday cake to the open sky.

Candela found his three children, after hours of searching, huddled and whimpering on the ground in a state of shock.

"I lost everything," Candela said, "except my life and my family."

Then the waves of state and federal relief workers, volunteers and the national media began to flood the town. The long, slow road to recovery had begun.

Today, the polished marble plaques of many of the tornado’s victims still gleam in the Saragosa Cemetery. The bouquets of silk flowers, religious statuaries and wooden crosses fill the garden of the deceased.

The names are familiar to all in this town. Saragosa, where most of the residents are related, has continued a grudging growth during the past decade — from 185 in 1980 to more than 250 today, Tarin said.

The families of Garza, Casias, Ontiverez, Brijalba, Balderas and Contreras have plots in the cemetery.

The red marble atop their graves reads simply: "Saragosa Tornado Victim."

The town has changed since the devastation, residents agree.

"They still love their community a lot," Tarin said.

The No. 1 employer still is agriculture, but an expanding county prison and various small industries are employing more, he said.

"People are still very touchy about any bad weather," said Tarin. An employee of the commissioner, who as a child lost both parents to the ’87 tornado, still gets frantic when the wind and clouds start moving.

"He goes crazy trying to find a place to hide," Tarin said.

"Nobody forgot that day," agreed Candela. "Every year we watch the mountains and the clouds. Sometimes at night we can’t sleep because the air is too heavy.

"At one time it looked like progress here — and then nothing. Nobody remembers this little town. It’s misery, completely."

The Odessa American