CYPRESS, Texas – It’s not often you hear a firefighter tell you they were scared. But that’s exactly what a Cy-Fair Firefighter shared after riding out a tornado in the garage of a home that was just struck by lightning.
That’s a lot to unfold in the first line of the story. So, let’s talk about why the firefighters were at the home on Lake Riata Lane in the Barker Lake neighborhood of Cypress in the first place.
A crew from Cy-Fair Fire Department’s Station 11 was called to the home after lightning reportedly struck the home.
“I heard this big lightning and you had to run in the house because it felt like it was right there,” said Emil Ferenz, the Cypress resident whose home was hit by the lightning bolt.
The firefighters investigated some smoke in his attic, but found no fire. They were about to hop back in the fire truck when they noticed something in the air.
Their instincts led them to seek shelter rather than return to the station.
“We saw a wind coming one direction... then everything else, all trees, branches started flying in the other way,” recalled Ferenz.
For John Toussaint, a firefighter and EMT with the Cy-Fair Fire Department, the experience was unprecedented.
“It was my first time ever experiencing that situation,” said Toussaint, who despite regularly facing dangerous situations, admitted, “I was a little bit afraid. You know, we’re all human, right? That time for me where I was like, ‘oh wow, you know we’re in a tornado.’”
The entire incident was recorded by cameras mounted on the Cy-Fair fire truck, part of a modern system similar to police body cameras.
It has since received thousands of reactions on social media.
“They felt good about it,” Ferenz said. “They said, ‘Thank you for letting us shelter here,’” he recounted. “And I said hey, ‘What am I gonna do to send you out in the street?’”
The dramatic footage from the fire truck’s cameras shows the tornado’s raw power as it swept through the neighborhood, with howling winds visible through rain-streaked lenses before dissipating as quickly as it formed.