Tornado tossed around pool house, big gazebo, destroyed swath of trees across Stagecoach Road property
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
MARMORA – To Charles Pomlear, the wind giant that stomped through his property at 326 Stagecoach Road, smashing a fence, picking up and knocking over a big pool house and a gazebo, then snapping off and knocking down scores of big trees, sounded like “a big gust of wind.”
He didn’t hear a lot of noise, no banging or crashing. His wife, Mary, who was asleep in the house mere feet away, didn’t even wake up.
“‘Everything’s gone.’ That’s what he said when he come into the bedroom and he woke me up,” Mary said Tuesday afternoon, a few hours after the storm. “I was like, ‘What do you mean everything’s gone?’ And he’s like, the pool house is gone. It’s upside-down.”
“A lot of stuff is gone. I don’t know where half of it went,” she said.
Charles said he didn’t get the warning in time. “After the storm came through, I got it on my phone.”
The tornado just before 10 a.m. Tuesday morning, Aug. 4, hopscotched from the bay behind Strathmere, across the Garden State Parkway and over to Marmora, where severe damage was visible on either side of Route 9 to just west of Stagecoach Road.
The tornado twisted up the fence around the Pomlears’ in-ground pool, picked up and tossed around the buildings by the pool and as an extra touch smashed the little cage that held the couple’s pot-bellied pig.
“Somehow it picked all the furniture up and threw it into the gazebo,” Charles said. “We had a glass table on the outside and it’s all busted up on the inside,” he added, pointing to the broken glass and twisted remains of the table inside the gazebo, where it tore through a screen window. “Here’s the legs to the table and there is all the busted glass from it. That was on the outside of the gazebo. It took it right through the screen and put it inside.”
“We were like ‘what in the world?’” Mary said. “And we just bought some of that furniture to put in the pool house and it’s all ruined. I just want to scream.
“It pulled the pool house up over the fence.” She added if it wasn’t for the extended roof on one side that it was now leaning on, “it probably would have ended up in somebody else’s yard.”
“I had a 10-foot overhang (on the pool house) for a picnic table to go under there so you could sit to eat,” he said. “Yup,” he added in disbelief, shaking his head. That overhang was now touching the ground.
“And this was all brand new,” she said. “Not no more,” he added.
They had been working on the pool house the past few months and were adding the finishing touches. “He just put the light on it the other day,” she said. “It’s a nightmare.”
“This is a disaster,” he said, pointing to another building that was damaged. “It ripped the roof off of that shed. That’s laying there on the ground.”
They have lived there for 35 years. Had they ever seen anything like this? “Nope,” Charles said, shaking his head again, looking at the gazebo and pool house. “It looked like a front-end loader lifted it up and set it down. It just picked it up and dumped it like that.”
“And it just went through here so fast,” Mary said. “He came in the bedroom and told me and I’m like, ‘What the heck are you talking about?’ It was just like this. It uprooted the trees. There must be a hundred trees and it ripped them right up.”
Their property goes back from Stagecoach Road into forest and there were numerous trees blown down, their roots unearthed, and scores of others broken off.
“It goes all the way back like that,” Mary said, pointing to the broken and uprooted trees in a huge swath. “Big trees were pulled up by the roots …. You can’t even walk out back. The path that goes out back you can’t even get to it. The trees are all over it.
“You can see where the trees are just dangling. It was like someone was just ripping them apart. It just kept right on going. And they’re big trees. It’s really weird. If you walk through here, you can see how bad it is. It looks like a bulldozer went through there. It looks like it was right in that path.“
“We have a little pig. That poor little thing was so scared. That was her cage,” she said, pointing to a small twisted-up metal enclosure. “And that’s what it did to her cage. And we found her out here running around hollering .. (The tornado) just picked it up and twisted it and broke it all to pieces.” They found another cage for the little pig. Dogs, in houses behind fences about 35 yards away, were not hurt.
“I never seen anything in my life like this,” Mary said. “Just like it was gunning, just ripping straight through. It looks like someone took a tractor and made their way through here pissed off.
“I told Mother Nature, you know what, go to hell Mother Nature. I’m so pissed off right now.
“This is such craziness.”
