Canton, TX–When a tornado blasted through this east Texas town last Friday, it didn’t do much to faze the spirit of an RVing woman.

Canton is home to what they proudly hail as the world’s largest open-air market. As many as 7,000 vendors set up shop to handle some 300,000 visitors who descend on the weekend preceeding the first Monday of the month. Only this month, one of the visitors was most unwelcome–a twister that blew through a group of RVs set up at the Canton site.

It came in so quickly that many of the RVers simply had time to ‘hit the decks’ of their RVs, rather than scramble for any other shelter. One RVer, Shirley Chaffee, recalls, that things “Just started shaking the trailer, we didn’t know if we were going to be picked up or whatever. It’s very scary.”

When the shaking stopped, the Shirley and her husband Carl found their neighbor’s trailer had been blown into theirs, and lying on its side, had trapped its owner. Carl and another RVer immediately got started on rescuing the unfortunate woman–an act which required breaking out a window. When they finally got to Mary Renfro, the neighbor, she’d apparently taken the experience in stride.

Holding a Walmart shopping bag, Mary looked up and said, “I hope I’ve got it all.”

stock photo: chimothy27 on flickr.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 7:09 am and is filed under Extreme Weather, general, rv accidents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.