doug spends the day organizing relief

KILLER TORNADO:A SPECIAL REPORT
Dawn of devastation
Within an hour, storm leaves 19 dead or dying
by Jeff Kunerth
The killer storm started in the Gulf of Mexico and began its grim journey across the state at 2:30 a.m. Friday.While racing across Citrus County, it was relatively small. But that would change in Sumter County in less than 10 minutes. Paul Close, a forecaster at the National Weather Service in Tampa, was watching radar when the storm exploded.

"It went from a little hint of something to 'Oh, no!' " Close said. He issued a tornado warning at 3:02 a.m. Just 13 minutes later, a twister struck trees near Wildwood and quickly knocked roofing off a nearby gas station.From there, the tornado thrashed across rural landscape until it hit The Villages, the retirement mega-community that sprawls across Sumter and Lake counties. There, in the space of about 10 minutes, it killed at least six people in Lady Lake and 13 in the rural Paisley/Lake Mack communities about 25 miles to the northeast.

The weather service's preliminary estimates indicate the tornado was an F3 with winds of 140 mph to 160 mph, said meteorologist Dave Sharp of the service's office in Melbourne. And as it hopped and skipped across The Villages -- damaging or destroying 1,500 homes -- it showed awesome power."Everything just exploded." The storm flattened houses and mobile homes, downed trees and overturned cars from Lady Lake to Ponce Inlet, from Umatilla to New Smyrna, while four other powerful thunderstorms swept the rest of the region with gusty winds and heavy rains. The wind blew so hard across Interstate 4 that it picked up a tractor-trailer and tossed it atop another semi, stalling traffic for hours.Within the span of one hour, the storm damaged or destroyed an estimated 2,000 homes, caused more than $80 million in damage, injured at least 50 people, left 7,800 people without power late Friday and delivered tragedy to the families of the 19 killed.

"The most dangerous tornado scenario is a threat for killer tornadoes at night, and that was the case," said Sharp, the weather-service meteorologist.