First Hit by a Tornado, Then by the Flood: “I Feel Like Our Family Is Cursed”

As she sat in a camping chair surrounded by rotting debris this week, the temperature nearing 100 degrees while bugs flitted past and sweat poured from her brow, Terry Traugott wondered if her family was cursed. Though she was surveying the damage to her mother’s Leander home, just over a hundred feet from Sandy Creek, the 65-year-old felt as though she was peering back in time. Nearly thirty years earlier, a tornado had ripped through a subdivision outside Jarrell, just north of Austin. The nearly mile-wide black column, which was powerful enough to rip pavement from roadways, descended from the clouds without warning, killing her uncle and turning his neighborhood into a twisted pile of wreckage. When the National Guard eventually let Traugott visit what remained,…

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