Neighbors recall harrowing ordeal

Minutes later, it ripped a section of roof from Munger Hill Elementary School. “By the grace of God, there were only a few kids left on the property,’’ said Mayor Dan Knapik of Westfield.

It then barreled at some 40 miles an hour toward Springfield, where Deborah Alexander had so little warning that she could only curl in a living room recliner with faded blue upholstery and pray as windows shattered and the tornado tore the second floor off her duplex.

Over three hours Wednesday afternoon and evening, tornados cut a fierce path through Springfield, Monson, Brimfield, and Sturbridge, damaging or leveling scores of buildings and leaving curiously unscathed some houses that remain standing next to heartbreaking destruction.

A few blocks from the Prenosils, Munger Hill Elementary School was nearly empty when the storm hit a little after 4 p.m., tearing a hole in the roof over a kindergarten classroom.

“Just an hour earlier, we would have been in the middle of dismissing 500 kids, and it would have been an absolute disaster,’’ Knapik said, touring the property yesterday afternoon.

As is often the case with tornados, timing was everything as they rolled through Western Massachusetts.

As the tornado departed Westfield heading east, Eugene Alexander Malone of Belchertown had been planning to take his children to Springfield for an afternoon with his mother. He had been procrastinating about the trip when his phone rang.

“She called to tell me the tornado was going to hit Belchertown,’’ he said. “Three minutes later, she called and said the roof was off her house.’’

“I was watching TV,’’ said his mother, Deborah Alexander. “The next thing I knew, I heard wind and breaking glass. I couldn’t even get to my basement.’’

When the storm passed and she climbed out of the recliner she called “my mother’s chair,’’ Alexander was amazed to see a crucifix clinging to its place on the wall, her religious statues still standing in the hall, and her Bibles where she left them in an upstairs bedroom suddenly open to the sky.