WELLINGTON — Forty-eight hours after the tornado , Sam Rider was still in tears.
The twister had ripped the roof off his home in Rustic Ranches, a community in the horse country off Flying Cow Road, with a terrifying sound.
“It was like a mortar shock with 100 explosions all around us,” he recalled Friday.
Then a ceiling beam fell on him as the winds filled the house. His son, Geronimo, pulled him up and they tried to hide in a bedroom closet. Their combined body weight wasn’t enough to close the door.
The wind blew away their air-conditioning shaft that sat in the closet — and then it lifted Sam Rider himself off the floor.
Geronimo caught his dad by the arm and held on to him until the tornado passed.
“Come down to the floor, Dad,” Rider recalled his son pleading. “Come on down, Dad.”
And then it stopped. He’d survived the scariest two minutes of his life.
“I didn’t think anyone could survive one of these,” Rider said.
Hurricane Milton spawned the tornado that plowed through Wellington’s western edge at about 4:30 p.m. Wednesday before the storm made landfall on Siesta Key along the Gulf Coast. Wellington Mayor Michael Napoleon said it left much of the residential and equestrian communities along the village’s western edge unrecognizable.