Jarrell Residents Know Pain Missouri & Alabama Families Feel

JARRELL (CBSDFW.COM) - Fourteen years ago a small Central Texas town went through what people in Missouri and Alabama are going through now.

A tornado considered by researchers at the time to be the most powerful ever left unimaginable destruction in the town of Jarrell.

27 people were killed by a tornado so poweful, that well built homes didn't stand a chance and people in them had no safe place to hide.

Witnesses could only watch in horror when a tornado with winds up to 300 miles per hour churned through Jarrell on May 27, 1997.

Mayor Dewey Hulme was among them.  "Standing on the corner I could see debris flying around that funnell and I knew some of the people that lived out here weren't going to survive that."

Five members of one family were among those killed.  Most of the dead lived in the Double Creek Estates, where only clean foundations remained of 38 homes.

The home of Fern Williams was among them, but she was away at work.  "I came home to nothing."

The town now has a memorial park in the middle of what was devastation.

While Jarrell will never forget its past, residents have moved on and the town is growing.  Among the new editions, underground storm shelters.