Andy Smith was watching television in his East Brainerd home on Sunday night when a tornado warning for his area flashed across the TV screen.
"It said it would be here in 15 minutes," he recalled Monday morning. "So we grabbed the kids and headed for an interior closet. It seemed like two minutes, though. You know how everybody says it sounds like a train? It absolutely does. But the pressure was what I couldn't believe. It was so hard on my ears."
The tornado was certainly hard on his home. It blew the roof off the house and did other damage. Fortunately for Smith, his father-in-law is a contractor who believes the home can be salvaged.
"We're safe," Smith said. "That's all that matters."
It's often said that if you have your health, you have everything, and in the year of COVID-19 it's tough to argue with that. But even if your losses were limited to a home, a business, a car - as so many in our area endured during Sunday's tornadoes and storms - is to understandably wonder when enough is enough.
The grim statistics arrived with the dawn: At least eight dead in Chattanooga and our surrounding areas. Dozens injured. Some 150 homes and businesses damaged. As many as 50,000 without power, and possibly for a week or longer. It was almost like experiencing the devastating tornado outbreak of April 27, 2011, the one that all but flattened Ringgold, killed 22 people in the Chattanooga area and continues to haunt many each time a tornado siren roars.
"If you can think about what that is like to see four miles of relatively consistent damage," said Mayor Andy Berke during a news conference after flying over the destruction. "We saw houses that were destroyed, places where roofs had shingles knocked off of them, places where outside pools were turned over - everything you could see, I saw from the sky. It was devastating. The human toll of this is extremely difficult."
In many ways, Smith is one of the lucky ones. He and Amber, 13-year-old twin daughters Ava and Anni, son Avery and the dogs - Lucy the German Shepherd and Luni the Husky - can stay with his parents, Paula and Joe, the longtime school board member.
Said Joe on Monday of the arrival of Andy and Amber's family as well as a neighboring family whose home was knocked off its foundation, "We're now home to six dogs and five kids. I'm just glad we had a home they could all go to. It could have been a lot worse."
It. Could. Have. Been. Worse.
Honors Course director of golf Henrik Simonsen pretty much uttered those exact words to describe the destruction done to the state of Tennessee's most famous and spectacular course.
"So much damage, devastating," he said of the hundreds of trees that were stripped of the majority of their limbs or, in his words, "cut in half. You wouldn't believe it. But the clubhouse is fine. The guest houses are fine, other than the lodge, which a tree fell on. Even that was lucky, though, because normally we have people staying there on their way home from the Masters. But with the Masters postponed, no one was there, which was good, because I don't think anyone would have made it out alive."
(READ MORE: Powerful overnight storms kill 7 in Murray County, Georgia; at least 23 people injured)
That doesn't mean it won't take time to get the course up and running again.
"It will take the rest of the summer to get it back," Simonsen said. "But this golf course will be as good as it's ever been."
However, to return to that other problem we're all facing - the coronavirus - the Honors' next big event is a fundraising tourney for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga golf program that's scheduled for September.
Noted Simonsen: "The golf course will be ready. It's more a matter of whether or not the coronavirus will be gone by then."
UTC football coach Rusty Wright lives at Council Fire, which is home to another of the city's finer golf courses.
He and wife Kelley were getting ready for bed Sunday night when they saw the tornado warning. With daughter Maddie home from Belmont because of the coronavirus, they all huddled in a closet in the middle of their home.
Reached Monday morning, Wright said, "It was interesting. But other than a few trees coming down and the 18th fairway looking like a river right now, we were probably lucky around here."
If we're all lucky, we won't have to deal with another such weather emergency while we're still dealing with COVID-19. One nightmare at a time is more than enough.
But Andy Smith wasn't sweating all he lost Sunday night. Instead, the man who's done so much to rebuild the lives of at-risk youth in our town through the YCAP boxing program his father founded, was thankful for what he didn't lose in the storm.
"A lost life can't come back," he said. "You can always rebuild a house."
Mark WiedmerContact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @TFPWeeds.