Monday night’s EF-2 tornado had just plowed through four blocks of Ottawa, Kansas, ripping off roofs and demolishing buildings as the storm muscled its way east.

Twenty-five miles later, at the Shady Acres R.V. Park in Hillsdale, a twister descended, lifting and tossing and spinning mobile homes like Lego pieces.

“Then we could see the funnel coming toward us,” Asad Morani said. Age 30, he is the owner of the Hillsdale’s Sunoco Lake-N-Dale convenience and gas station at 2549 Old Kansas City Road.

“It was slow, but it was intense,” Morani recalled Tuesday.

Tornado reached Hillsdale, Kansas

So he did what he knows he should not have done. He stepped outside with his cellphone — “Just for a second,” Moroni said — to capture a photo and a 9-second video of the tornado inside a monstrous black storm system, ripped through by flashes of lightning, as it crawled closer. A tornado siren blasted its alarm.

Then a transformer exploded. Morani, an Overland Park resident and 2013 graduate of Blue Valley North High School, ran for safety.

“Three other of my local customer were with me. I was like, ‘All right guys, we’ve got to get inside.' ... I locked all the doors. I turned the emergency pumps off, just because you’ve got to be safe.”

The four took shelter inside a convenience store cooler with the sodas and water and beer. Morani sat on a case of Bud Light.

“Opened the cooler. Ran in the cooler. It’s all metal,” he said.

The tornado thundered by.

“It was like a freight train was driving over and around us,” Morani said. “The floor and the roof were shaking.”

He wasn’t concerned for his life. Morani said he had survived two others, one when he was very young, which he couldn’t recall. The other was on April 27, 2011, when his lived in Alabama. Sixty-two tornados touched down in the state that day.

Inside the cooler, to cut the tension, “We were just like cracking jokes: Mother Nature is pissed right now. When she hits, she hits hard.”

His concerns and his thoughts, however, did go to the drivers he had seen outside on the roads, speeding away from the storm as fast as they could.

“People were flooring it,” he said.

Only later did he hear that Shady Acres, the R.V. park, was decimated, glad that no one there or in Ottawa lost their lives.

The worst of the storm passed in three minutes, Morani estimated.

About 10 minutes after it passed, he and his customers ventured outside. Utility poles were snapped like toothpicks. Trees stood cracked and broken, metal twisted among the remaining branches. Others were heaved from their roots.

The canopy that covered his gas pumps had been swept away. Live power lines lay on the ground.

‘It’s a miracle’

Just down the block, Dedre Beattie and her husband, Paul, living for nearly 10 years on 255th Street, were home making dinner, with the window open, when she heard the thunder. Lightning began flashing.

“Of course, like rational Kansans, we come out to the back patio,” she joked.

The tornado siren sounded.

“But there was nothing going on,” she said. “There was no rain, there was no hail. There was absolutely nothing. It wasn’t even crazy windy at all.”

She went back inside. Soon after, her husband returned from outside.

“He was like, ‘We’ve got to get downstairs — like now.’ If my husband says we need to go downstairs, that means we have to get downstairs, because he would ride the storm out if he could.”

All seemed quiet at first, she said. Then the rain started, followed by hail.

“By the time we got downstairs, that’s when we could hear the wind. It was crazy. I was expecting to hear the whole house collapsing. . . .It was roaring.”

Morani’s Sunoco canopy ended up in their yard.

“I think it’s a miracle. It’s crazy for everybody to have made it through this,” Beattie said.

Morani had said the same.

“We’re alive,” he said. “That’s all that matters.”

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