What started as a sunny afternoon ended with cars flipped in the streets and buildings crushed by debris as the twister made its way around the intracoastal waterway near U.S. 1 on April 29. The path of destruction was narrow but left a stretch of land looking like a war zone. Homes and businesses that had withstood a half-dozen hurricanes over the past two decades were leveled by the tornado.
In the neighborhood of Sanctuary Cove, one of the hardest-hit communities, some residents barely avoided being impaled by falling trees and pelted by broken glass.
Julia Worster, who lives in the community in a second-floor apartment, tells New Times she was getting ready for a night on the town with her friends when she looked out the window and noticed the sky darken and the storm intensify.
Her dog Bandit, a small grey and white bichon-shih tzu mix, shook and panted under the pillows around her bed. He'd become progressively more anxious in recent weeks from the string of afternoon thunderstorms that passed through the area.
Bandit, tornado survivor, was quivering and panting under the pillows before his owner, Julia Worster, whisked him into the bathtub during the twister.
Photo by Julia Worster
"Then I'm looking out the window in my bedroom, and I'm like, this is not looking right... I had this gut feeling," she says. "No way this is actually happening."
Worster grabbed Bandit and darted into her bathroom seconds before the tornado blew out her windows and showered her bedroom with glass. She started to pray. Reluctant to look up, she feared she would see daylight from the roof peeling off.
"I was in the bathtub. The dog was shaking. I was shaking. You could almost hear it in the drain... It was like a howling," Worster tells New Times. "It was unreal. There's really no way to describe it. You just could feel the pressure."
About two minutes of mayhem persisted before the winds died down. Worster, a former elementary school teacher, then mustered the courage to emerge from the bathroom.
"I saw glass everywhere. I put shoes on, of course, and I looked out the window, and it just looked like something out of a horror movie," Worster recalls. "It lasted two minutes, but it felt like an hour. And then, when it was over, it was quiet enough to hear birds chirping. It was just so eerie."
The smell of fresh lumber from the split trees wafted toward her when she stepped outside.
Emergency responders swooped in and began taking chainsaws to the toppled debris, which had trapped some residents in their apartments. The top of Worster's apartment stayed intact, but a nearby building's roof was ripped clean off, exposing an entire unit to the elements.
"I remember going through Hurricanes Frances, Jeanne, and Wilma, those three back to back. That was nothing compared to this. I would take the hurricane any day. This came so fast," Worster says.
The National Weather Service released a preliminary report noting that the tornado was on the ground for 11 minutes ending around 5:20 p.m. on April 29. In that short time, it collapsed multiple roofs, destroyed businesses, and toppled utility poles. It formed just east of I-95 in Palm Beach Gardens and moved northeast before dissipating close to Juno Beach.
The outdoor showroom of a shop that had sold garden decorations, vases, and statues for decades near Juno Beach was smashed to bits when a metal structure collapsed onto it. One of the only items left standing was a 10-foot-high, blank-white Greco-Roman statue.
The National Weather Service estimates that the tornado's winds reached 130 mph, making it an EF-2 twister on the Fujita scale, which rates tornadoes on a scale of 1 to 5 intensity. It was five miles per hour short of an EF-3 rating.Whoa! I hope everyone is okay. Check out this insane tornado video out of Palm Beach Gardens. Note the flipped car! @CBS12 @natwxdesk pic.twitter.com/jh6FBBIi4C
— Michael Ehrenberg (@MichaelCBS12) April 29, 2023
The winds were as strong as a Category Four hurricane.
"At least [the damage] is not as widespread like we've seen in previous hurricanes. But it's just as impressive," meteorologist Steve Weagle said on an April 29 WPTV newscast in front of a graphic depicting the track of the tornado. "If you go back to five o'clock in the afternoon, here's that spin that we have in the atmosphere as it rolled through Palm Beach County. The track for this was about two miles long."
Crews spent the weekend clearing the roads. Major thoroughfares in Palm Beach Gardens and Juno Beach were passable by April 30.
The day after the tornado, the skies were mostly sunny over Sanctuary Cove, and residents strolled between towering piles of downed trees with their pets and children, carefully avoiding roof tiles and branches strewn around the parking lot, where wrecked vehicles still stood engulfed with debris. Small groups were forming outside while tenants regaled each other with their accounts of riding out the storm.
While Florida often ranks in the top ten U.S. states for annual tornado frequency, twisters as strong as the one that hit Palm Beach Gardens are relatively uncommon in the Sunshine State. According to a National Weather Service analysis, Palm Beach and Broward counties historically have been hotspots for tornado activity around Florida.
