BLUE RIDGE, Texas — Volunteer firefighters in Blue Ridge, Texas, were inside the fire station when a tornado hit Collin County. Firefighters were gearing up to be dispatched to weather-related emergencies when the building shattered.

What You Need To Know

  • Firefighters in Collin County were gearing up for weather-related calls when a tornado hit the fire station and ripped the roof off of the building

  • The Blue Ridge volunteer firefighters were inside at the time of the tornado, but nobody was injured

  • The roof ended up across the street at a church

  • Cellphone service and internet went down, and firefighters had to navigate to weather-related emergencies without the use of GPS

Corbin Nolan was one of the firefighters on “storm watch” duty on Monday night at the Blue Ridge Fire Department. They were inside, watching the weather and getting ready, knowing a call would come at any second.

“The power went off and was flickering for a couple minutes,” Nolan said. “The second tornado warning came about, and then not but a couple minutes later, the tornado hit.”

The emergency calls came in at that moment. The first one was a car wash right next door to the fire station.

“So we were all getting up to check on the vehicle and that’s when the roof came down on us,” Nolan explained. “The main part of came off this front section over here. And you can tell where from the bricks. And it kinda just blew all over into the back of the church over there.”

Nobody was hurt, but the tornado destroyed the building. Lt. Steve Straka said everything inside was destroyed as well.

“We lost everything. Every file, computer, training equipment, gear,” Straka said. “Our volunteers got what they could out, and got what they needed to work, at least for now. But I can imagine that in the future there will be things that we don’t use often, but desperately need one day, and we won’t realize it until that day comes and we can’t find it.”

Straka was already dispatched to another call and was not at the station when the roof collapsed.

“We had been split up for a call, so I was dispatched accordingly. I had no idea what happened until much later,” Straka said. “I got back from my call and my buddy is like, ‘Did you see the admin building?’ And I was like, ‘No. What happened to the admin. building?’ That’s when I walked in and saw water pouring out four inches deep, ceiling tiles falling out, and every piece of paper we’ve ever owned in that building was just going all over the place.”

The volunteer firefighters still worked through it, and serve Collin County through the storm.

“Everybody lost cell signal. There was no cell signal in the city at all. All the power was out, gas was out, internet was down, naturally,” Straka said. “It didn’t impact much, except for on the GPS side. It just required more upfront planning. You know, we had to look at the map, figure out exactly what roads we had to take to get where. But everything we give over the internet, we say over radio, so the internet is basically a redundancy. So we didn’t have any issues serving our county.”

The roof landed across the street in the yard of a church. Nolan said everyone was brave at the moment.

“It wasn’t really a fact of being scared or not. It just happened so fast that we didn’t have time to comprehend what was going on and what was happening,” Nolan said.

The insurance company has already been out to access the damage, but there is no dollar amount or estimate of exactly how much damage occurred just yet.