California man thought he could hold the door against a tornado

A gray-haired man stands and looks out the window with his hand in his pocket.

Staff Writer

April 10, 2023 5 AM PT

He fended off paramilitary forces in El Salvador during his country’s bloody civil war. He protected his soccer store during the 1992 Los Angeles riots with a gun that held only five bullets.

Nicolas Orellana thought nothing would ever surprise him again.

Then a tornado touched down in suburban L.A.

And for the first time in his eventful life, Orellana was not prepared.

Being from California, not Kansas, the 68-year-old, his son and a very petite employee (around 5 feet, about 100 pounds) thought they could hold the door against the angry force of nature as if it were a drunken interloper they were fending off.

They clutched a metal bar that spanned the flimsy glass entryway at Niky’s Sports warehouse in Montebello. Winds howled, 110 mph. Debris swirled in the air, lifted like feathers in a breeze.

Then the door frame buckled. The metal bar came off in their hands.

“When I felt the diabolical force of the wind, I feared the worst,” Orellana said, “that something terrible was going to happen.”

Niky's Sports warehouse in Montebello suffered significant damage when a tornado touched down last month.

It’s been more than two weeks since Orellana’s brush with the kind of meteorological monster more typical to Oklahoma, Texas and, yes, Dorothy’s Kansas. It’s hard to decide whether Orellana is the luckiest man in the world — he’s still standing — or the most snakebit.

In a county that’s more than 4,000 square miles, only 17 buildings were damaged by the tornado that touched down on March 22. His business — a family-run chain of soccer stores — was headquartered in one of them.

Orellana has yet to calculate the total damage. He has to find a new building for his operations, as the one he worked in remains red-tagged, along with 10 others.

The tornado, the strongest in Los Angeles County since 1983, landed as winter transitioned into spring, embodying the whirlwind of California’s extreme weather in the last few months.

There were floods. A lake that returned and swallowed up the land. Debate over whether it was snow, graupel or accumulated hail that fell on the Hollywood sign.

“But never in my life did I imagine a damn tornado,” said Orellana’s son, Edson.

There were about 15 people inside of Niky’s Sports on the Wednesday morning when the wind began to rage. An employee told Edson about a tornado warning in a neighboring county.

That kind of weather event “never happens here,” he told her. As if summoned, the wind swung the door open. One of the employees wrestled to keep it closed, and Edson got up to help.

Within seconds, he spotted a tornado across the street. Roofs had been ripped off and their remains were swirling in the vortex, along with other debris. They heard the whistle of the wind.

Orellana joined the two in pulling the door’s metal bar backward.

“We wanted to stop the monster from coming in,” he said.

The bar broke off in their hands, and the door crashed into the side window, shattering the glass. Afterward, the roof seemed to collapse above them. The pipes broke and showered water onto the Apple and Dell desktop computers.

Edson grabbed his computer and took shelter in the bathroom. He expected his father and their employee to follow.

“I don’t know what you do in a tornado,” he said. “My instinct was to get as far away from the flying debris as possible.”

Orellana was thrown to the ground. When he tried to get on his feet, the wind knocked him back again. He understood that if he tried again, he could crash into the ceiling or walls.

He rolled over to a corner and curled up, waiting for it to pass. It all played out, he said, in 65 seconds. When it was over, he checked on the team. Everyone had gotten through unscathed.

“I thought nothing could scare or surprise me after everything I’ve lived,” Orellana said. “But how wrong I was.”

An aerial view of crews starting to clean up debris after a tornado in Montebello.

The tornado, which cut a path nearly a half-mile long, was 50 yards wide and lasted for about three minutes. It registered an EF1 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, which measures weather events based on wind speed.

An EF1 tornado is any that records winds between 86 and 110 mph and is considered a “weak” whirlwind. The most powerful tornadoes — with designations of EF5 — have wind speeds of more than 200 mph.

“There’s a pretty sizable proportion of tornadoes across the country each year that spin up very quickly and dissipate too very quickly,” said Ariel Cohen, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service Los Angeles/Oxnard. “Too fast, unfortunately, to be warned for or detected.”

VIDEO | 00:23

Tornado in Montebello captured on camera

Video shows a tornado in Montebello ripping through a roof and sending debris flying on Wednesday.

Two weeks after the twister, on a Wednesday with clear skies, a fire alarm sounded every 10 seconds inside of Niky’s Sports. It smelled of mildew and the holes in the roof had been patched with wood. A tangle of wires hung like vines from the spaces where ceiling tiles had once been.

Photos of most of the chain’s nine stores were scattered on the floor, blown off of their nails.

In the warehouse, boxes of Nike shoes — valued at hundreds of dollars each — were soaked through with water. Orellana feared their logo printer, worth tens of thousands of dollars, no longer worked. They hadn’t yet been able to assess the full extent of the damage.

“These things are just material,” Orellana said, as he looked around the office, “but if it had hurt one of my kids, my employees, it would have been catastrophic.”

In a lengthy Facebook post last week titled “Consecrated survivor,” Orellana ran through his many adversities. The armed attack on his family home on Feb. 17, 1981, when he and his brothers protected themselves with pistols against paramilitary forces. His defense of one of his two stores during the 1992 riots, standing alone and armed with a pistol once more.

And the tornado, the “demon” that had snatched the door from them and destroyed everything in its path.

After it all, he wrote, “I keep giving thanks to the life that has given me so much.”

By the time they realized a tornado was racing their way, Edson said, it was too late to do more than just grip the door. Had they let go, he said, “I felt like one of us was just going to fly out of there.”

In retrospect, he said, “we did the dumbest thing that anyone would do in a tornado.”

It was a scene straight out of “Twister” — the 1996 film in which Edson saw his first tornado — when the actor who plays Helen Hunt’s father clings to the storm cellar door amid the howling wind. Eventually the tornado sucks him out, still clinging to the door. (It was kind of like that, Edson agreed, “but a little less dramatic.”)

Gary England, a longtime on-air meteorologist in Oklahoma and the voice of a meteorologist in the movie, confirmed that grabbing the door was “not the thing to do.”

“They’re really lucky,” England said. “If it had been stronger, might have been 160 or 170 [mph], it would have pulled the door off and them with it.”

When there’s a tornado, he said, people need to head to the lowest level possible. (“If you live in three-story apartment,” he said, “you might want to make friends with the people down on the bottom.”) People can also take shelter in a small room with four walls and away from outside windows — a bathroom or closet.

Once inside, he said, “you get your head down. If your rear end comes up, that’s OK.” After all, he said, it’s better to catch debris there than in the head.

Although tornadoes in California are rare, England said, it’s important to have a plan in place.

Just in case.

“You mess with Mother Nature,” he said, “and she’ll just bite your head right off.”