As North Texas braces for a week of active weather, a family in Rowlett is sharing lessons they learned from the Dec. 26 tornado that destroyed their home on Pebble Beach Drive.
Amy Rapp and her husband were out to dinner that night. Two of their children, 9-year-old Kameron and 14-year-old Dylan, were home alone for the first time. Rapp got an alert on her phone about the tornado, called home and told the children to go to the bathroom.
"It was, in our eyes, an act of God," Amy Rapp said. "If you could have seen the bathroom that they were in and rode out the storm, there's nothing short of a miracle."
The siblings climbed into the bathtub. Then the tornado hit.
"The house started shaking," Kameron said. "My brother was on top of me so nothing would fall on me or anything."
The siblings walked out of the bathroom to find the rest of their house gone.
"When we pulled up it looked like a war zone," Amy Rapp said, recalling pulling up to the house in a panic.
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"It means nothing whenever you have all their lives," she added. "I could not have imagined if it had gone different."
Amy Rapp said the tornado took everything, but the family still has everything they need. The tornado put life into perspective.
"We're not dying of cancer," she said. "Everything has been replaced. We couldn't have done this without the community."
The family said the community, friends and their children's teachers have come forward with donations and help with finding a place to rent while they look for a new home to buy.
"We would have liked to have rebuilt, but for the kids, they don't even like coming down this street sometimes," Amy Rapp explained. "So we're not going to rebuild here."
The family no longer takes North Texas weather for granted.
"I mean, everything with weather is a question now," the mother cautioned. "Where before it was just, 'It's gonna rain,' now it's a lot more than that."
