A sudden windstorm damaged parts of the Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum, Aug. 27. Museum director Rayanna Hoeft and her husband, Todd, witnessed the storm in action.
Rayanna Hoeft said she and her husband were working on site getting ready for the week earlier that afternoon. They moved to the Edgerton Photography building to work when the storm hit the area around thirty to forty minutes later.
“We knew there was a chance of storms during the day, but we didn’t expect that at all,” she said. “Since we have early 20th century cameras in the space that we were working in, I took cover under an early 20th-century developer. It lasted maybe 10 minutes and that was it. We thought about coming to take cover in the visitor center, but decided against it once we saw the debris flying around the museum.”
As the buildings in Spindletop open from the outside, the wind kept pushing the door of the photography building open.
“I had to make sure I was as safe as I could be with the door, so I held it in place,” Todd Hoeft said. “It was hard. I was having to push it in order to keep it closed. You didn't hear the train sound and the sky wasn't green, like the typical things you would expect to hear about tornados. We just thought it was a really heavy storm. We rode it out and then the winds were coming the other way, so that confirmed to us we definitely had (a tornado).”
The storm was short, but resulted in two roofs damaged — the saloon and the visitor center—a destroyed vintage wooden oil tank, and a few broken windows.
“The trash cans were airborne,” Rayanna Hoeft said. “I posted images on Facebook telling people, ‘If you don't hear from us, we're trapped in this building. Come get us,’ because we really didn't know what to expect.”
Before the storm, Rayanna Hoeft was planning to reopen the museum Tuesday after being closed for a few weeks, she said.
“I wanted to come up (here) just to make sure we were ready to re-open,” she said. “I'm so glad that we weren't open to the public. In that regard, I think we were very lucky. It could’ve been so much worse.
“I'm concerned about upcoming events. I don't know what that's going to look like, but I can't decide until we get a timeline on our repairs. We don't have use of the restrooms right now, we have no power, and we have no roof on certain buildings. We’ll just have to assess everything with our facilities crew, and go from there. My biggest concern as the museum director is my staff’s safety, so I've asked them not to come in today. We're (also) asking the public to stay away, and I'm posting things on social media so people can see what we're doing.”
For more information, visit lamar.edu/spindletop-gladys-city, or the museum’s Facebook page.
