By LEONARD GRAY

ST. ROSE – “I crawled out the window and stood in the rain, and I just cried.”

Frances Alaniz, 52, of 338 Eisenhower St., in Almedia Plantation Subdivision, had survived a direct hit Tuesday from a tornado on her mobile home. Alaniz works at night at Wal-Mart in Kenner and was home sleeping when the twister swept into the isolated neighborhood just prior to 10 a.m. She was alone at the time, as her companion, Jonathan Cherry, was at work at Philips Electric in Kenner.

“I just turned around in some rich person’s yard,” he said when he got her phone call. “When I saw it, I couldn’t believe she was alive.”

After the twister’s passage, she crawled out the bedroom window, surveyed the destruction, including insulating material in the nearby trees, and walked to neighbor Walter Bondos’ home to use his telephone.

“She came in a little bit of shock with her elbow bleeding a bit,” Bondos said.

Bondos had his own problems. He had been in the kitchen, drinking his morning coffee when the tornado tore away his front porch and scraped off the roof of his bedroom, bathroom and spare room.

The wheelchair-bound resident added, “I’ve got nothing left. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Bondos’ home was the worst hit of the 17 homes affected. Three others had major damage and 13 more had minor damage, according to Bill Salmeron, assistant director of emergency services for the American Red Cross in the New Orleans office.

Hardest-hit in the small residential area were Eisenhower and Johnson streets.

“A lot of (the trailers) were picked up and dropped,” Salmeron said.

Work crews from St. Charles Parish Public Works poured into the area, assisting in clearing the streets and removing debris. Entergy crews also responded to repair power lines and restore electricity to the area.

Entergy customer service manager Doug Rhodes said their equipment detected the outage for 900 customers “instantly” and crews were on the scene in 10 minutes. Two poles were down and a feeder system was knocked off-line. Within four hours all but eight homes had power restored.

The neighborhood was still recovering from the double-whammy of Tropical Storm Isidore and Hurricane Lili, which flooded the area for several days, Tyler Tardo, of Eisenhower St., said.