A restaurant owner's remarkable act of heroism saved many lives during a storm in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, which destroyed a local restaurant.
Tracy Harden, the owner of Chuck's Dairy Bar, rushed her staff into a walk-in cooler moments before a tornado hit the establishment on Friday.
Harden spoke to Good Morning America reporter Robin Roberts on Monday alongside two employees, Barbara Pinkins and Carolyn Washington, who were both in the restaurant when the tornado hit.
As the horrible tornado tore through the local area, Harden said she only had a minute of advance notice before it came moving rapidly through the restaurant.
"I got two text messages back-to-back from my sister and my daughter in Vicksburg and they both said, "There's a tornado down, get to a safe place.' At the same time I had my teenage cashier came running towards the back of the building saying, ‘My mother is on the phone and she said there is a tornado down here.' At that point, most of us were towards the back of the building and the lights flickered(闪烁). And I just shouted, ‘Cooler!' And my husband opened the cooler door and started pushing us in."
Harden said that once her husband got them all inside, including himself, "he lost control of the door, the wind took the door and somehow he was able to get the door back."
"Just before it shut, he looked up and he said, ‘I see the sky,' so that let us know that this was way worse than anything we could have imagined," she continued. "And the roof was gone."
Pinkins, meanwhile, recalled the chaos(混乱场面)before the tornado touched the restaurant, as Harden led people to safety. She said she remembered hearing Harden say,"Calm down. Everybody gets to the cooler!"
"By the time we got to the cooler, I couldn't hear anything but the ceiling falling," Pinkins said through tears, hugging Harden.
