Gustavo Puga’s cellphone rang early Thursday afternoon on his trucking run across the southeastern plains, homeward to the town of Holly.
It was his nephew calling from Greeley, speaking a word that had a chilling resonance: tornado.
For Holly’s residents, news of the twisters that ripped across the landscape Thursday, hundreds of miles north, reminded them how quick and devastating — and how fickle — the weather can be.
“My brother is one of those who’d say, ‘Greeley would never have a tornado,’ ” said Puga. “I told him, ‘We used to say that here in Holly.’ We never worried so much about it.”
Last year, Puga never saw the tornado that slammed into the home where he and his wife, Rosemary, and daughter Noelia, then 3, huddled together. All three were blown into the limbs of a nearby tree. Rosemary later died from her injuries, one of two deaths from a tragedy that left Holly in shambles.
Puga’s older brother Oscar and his family suffered no damage or injury from Thursday’s tornadoes that cut a swath across the state’s northern plains. His nephew called to make sure Puga hadn’t run headlong into nasty weather on his trucking run.
He hadn’t.
“I pretty much told them to be careful, to watch out for what’s going on,” Puga said as headed home from delivering corn and wheat.
Residents throughout the town felt the pain of the tornado’s victims.
“Our spirits are wounded anew by the reports of loss of life, damage and carnage,” said Holly Mayor W. Bruce Roup in a statement relayed through the governor’s office. “Our community will commit to holding you in our thoughts and prayers during this very difficult time.”
Roup and his wife lost their house in the 2007 tornado and only recently moved into a new home.
Holly town administrator Marsha Willhite had gone home for lunch Thursday, turned on her television and felt a wrenching empathy for the people she saw on her screen.
“My gut immediately went into a knot,” she said. “I’m sure everybody in our community feels deeply for those folks.”
Holly hasn’t finished rebuilding from its own devastation.
“Our hearts go out not only because of the disaster, but because now we know what they’ve got ahead of them,” said Willhite. “It’s tough. Everyone will be thinking of them.”
Holly, she said, learned one overriding lesson from its tornado experience.
“You must persevere,” she said, “whether on a personal level or a local government level.”
