Dog sucked out of home in tornado, returns hours later

OCEAN ISLE BEACH, N.C. (WECT) - Brittany Memory says her little Yorkshire Terrier, Penny, gave her a warning something was wrong when she sat straight up on the bed Monday night. The power had just gone out, but it was storming outside so she thought her dog was alerting her to something else.

“I actually thought someone was in the house, and I leaned up and turned on the flashlight on my phone,” Memory says. “And about that time it sounded like a train.”

Within seconds she says the so-called train sounded like it was just outside her bedroom. She didn’t have time to concentrate on anything but protecting her son.

“When I looked, I didn’t have time. If I had waited a second, me and my son would have been out the back door. I didn’t have time to grab Penny.”

An EF-3 tornado ripped homes off foundations and knocked 18-wheelers over on Green Bay Rd. in Ocean Isle Beach. A couple miles away, the destruction was far more devastating. Three people were killed and ten were injured.

The powerful twister lifted everything in Memory’s house and blew mirrors off walls. The ferocious winds also sucked Penny, her dog, out of the back of the house.

“She flew out right here in the back with all my covers,” she said pointing to the back of her house that now has a large gaping hole. “It ripped the sheets off my bed. She was just bundled up in it.”

Memory said she had a hard time explaining what happened to Penny to her son.

“I was terrified, I didn’t think she was alive. But I just kept telling my little boy ‘she’s an animal, she’ll be okay, God’s got her. Everything’s going to be all right. We’re safe and everything can be replaced, we can’t.’”

Little Penny eventually found her way back home a few hours later. She was shivering and traumatized, but otherwise unharmed.

“She just had a little bit of glass stuck to her and we took her to the vet and everything is okay.”

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