A miracle in Channelview: Residents reflect upon 30th anniversary of Houston's only F4 tornado

CHANNELVIEW, Texas (KTRK) -- On the Saturday before Thanksgiving in 1992, no one in Channelview's Sterling Green neighborhood could imagine the sheer terror that would unfold. While many were settling in to watch college football or do some holiday shopping that afternoon, a tornado outbreak began west of Houston in Katy.

The unusually powerful storm system produced six tornadoes in Harris County alone, with three of those tornadoes on the ground at the same time: An F2 that touched down near Rice University, an F3 near Lake Houston, and the only F4 in Harris County's history tearing through Channelview.

As the Channelview tornado blew into Sterling Green from the south, the tornado grew to over a mile wide and started shredding homes down to the slab.

On Littleport Lane, Vira Garza and her husband were looking out of their garage after getting a report a tornado touched down nearby. Vira spotted the tornado first.

"I said, 'Look, honey. There's blackbirds, a lot of them.' He said, 'No, that's not blackbirds. It's debris. And that's the tornado.' And I was in complete shock," Garza said.

As the Garzas ran to hide inside a closet, a street away, on Macclesby Lane, Robert Collins looked out his window after the power went out. First, he saw his fence fly away. Then he saw his neighbor's roof flying straight toward his house.

"And as I turned to run, things started imploding, house started tearing up, the door slammed, and I couldn't get out. So, I dodged into a corner of the room, and at that time it had ripped off part of the house," Robert Collins said.

Collins' wife, Pamela, and daughter, Roberta, were also caught up in the tornado. They had just left to go to the store and rode out the terrifying ordeal in their car.

"We cried, and we prayed, and told each other how much we love each other because we didn't think we were going to make it. The car started rising up and it slammed back down. It started rising up again and then it slammed back down," Pamela Collins said.

The next few minutes felt like an eternity for all the residents of Sterling Green who were home at the time.

"It sounded like a freight train, something just shaking. The house was shaking, and we thought it was going to fall apart on us," Garza remembered.

Pamela Collins and her daughter sheltered from debris on the floorboard of their car.

"We could hear the car being hit and the windows breaking and debris. We could feel debris coming inside of the car. We could feel it. We had cuts all over us," Pamela Collins said.

Back at their residence, Robert Collins recalled, "I was completely covered in insulation. About three minutes, nothing. Over. Silence. Dead silence."

Shocked survivors emerged from what remained of their shelters and could not believe their eyes.

"I looked up and looked around behind me and noticed all the houses behind me were gone and cars were turned over and everything like that," Pamela Collins said.

The tornado completely destroyed 14 houses in Sterling Green, with only a few interior walls left standing in 88 homes. Nearly 200 others lost their roofs.

Thankfully, tornadoes of this magnitude are incredibly rare in southeast Texas. Over 90% of Houston's tornadoes are on the slower end of the Enhanced Fujita scale with winds less than 90 mph.

"Although they do damage, they're not typically major structural damage or tornadoes with fatalities," says National Weather Service Meteorologist Lance Wood.

Miraculously, not a single person died that fateful November day. Part of the credit went to the National Weather Service forecasters providing warnings up to 20 minutes in advance. Recently installed radar technology was so new they hadn't even fully calibrated the radar, but it allowed them to see the rotating winds of a tornado inside the storms for the first time.

"It made all the difference. I guarantee you, if we had not had this radar...we would've missed the onset of them. This gave us the lead time," Bill Read said, who at the time was the Meteorologist-In-Charge at the Houston National Weather Service Office.

Yet in the days before the Internet and smartphone technology at our fingertips, many people did not receive those warnings and were completely oblivious to the tornado threat.

"You might call it a God thing because I just don't know how on a Saturday so many long-track tornadoes can go through so much populated area over our usually crowded interstates and nobody loses their life," Read said.

Some residents like, Stephen McCanless, were away from home. He returned to find the top story of his house blown away and told us things could have turned out drastically different for his daughter Hilery, then 22-months-old.

"She would take a nap every day from about 1:30 to 3:30. She would've been up in the loft, she would've been gone," McCanless said.

Despite all the carnage, everyone in Sterling Green and elsewhere impacted by the tornadoes had something to be extra thankful for that Thanksgiving. They were all alive.

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