Man who was thrown 1,300ft by tornado opens up on what it was like
A man who was thrown 1,300ft by a tornado opened up about the terrifying ordeal.
A tornado ripped across Missouri back in 2006, and Matt Suter was swept up by it and dropped a quarter of a mile away; remarkably, he lived to tell the tale.
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Matt was 19 at the time, and the experience is understandably all a blur - largely 'cause he was KO'd by a lamp.
Speaking to CNN, he said: "Well, it felt like - I don't know. It was just really crazy how it all was.
"I can remember my part of the trailer that I was in flipping over and everything.
"I remember getting hit in the head, and then after that I woke up in the middle of a field 1,307 feet away."
Asked if he remembered being airborne, he replied: "No, I sure don't. The lamp that hit me in the head knocked me unconscious."
Matt came around after five or 10 minutes, and was naturally completely bewildered.
"I was kind of confused," he said. "I didn't know what happened.
"And I stood up, and then the lightning hit off in the distance, and it lit up everything.
"So I assumed that... where my grandmother's trailer usually sits, it was gone. So I knew something bad happened. And I only had my boxer shorts on.
"So I got up, took off, ran to the next-door neighbour's house, jumping barbed-wire fences and running as fast as I can on a dirt road."
Astonishingly, this post-dumping running did as much damage as the dumping itself.
He said: "I'm grateful that I'm alive, and the only injuries I had was abrasions to my feet from running on the gravel and a laceration on top of my head that - which caused me to get five staples."
Bloody hell, what are Matt's bones made of? That kid had been drinking his milk.
Miraculously surviving the tornado tossing did change Matt though, and he said he'd started paying his thanks to the big guy in the sky.
"I believe in God and I'm starting to go to church and whatnot," he said. "And I'm just grateful to be alive after this."
Jake Massey