A severe weather event likened to a Tornado, called a Microburst, made its way through Central Pennsylvania Sunday Night.
It resulted in downed trees and power outages throughout the region.
State College man Tim Lavanish was camping and found himself trapped in Poe Valley State Park in the horrendous conditions, but managed to get out alive.
Dylan Huberman spoke with the man earlier Today and tell us more on what happened.
Lavanish went camping expecting a fun weekend in the wilderness. In the end, he was lucky to escape the trip with his life.
Torrential storms carved through Pennsylvania’s wilderness Sunday evening, including Centre County’s Poe Valley State ark, where Tim Lavanish had went camping for the weekend.
However, the incoming microburst had other ideas, and his tent was uprooted by the storm.
“The…tent started pulling up off the ground and the poles snapped in half, and it sucking the tent up into the sky.”
Shortly after the tent went up, the winds then grabbed him.
“And I started lifting off the ground…uh…and that was whenever I, I knew I was going to die.”
Lavanish’s pickup truck, which he uses for his landscaping and snow removal business, was mashed by trees. It was towed back to his State College home but has been deemed totaled.
However, it was actually a tree that saved his life, and he feels it was due to divine intervention.
“It just felt like God sent the tree to pull me back down to the ground.”
He says some quick thinking and fast reactions got him in a position to survive.
“It (the tree) was falling and I clipped it with my arm, I caught under the underside of it. It brought me right back down to the ground real nice and gently…when it hit the ground, it was really
violent but, um, I just wedged myself in there, until the wind stopped.”
When the terror of death blew away, an emotional Lavanish says he couldn’t believe he was still here.
“After it was over, I just started laughing, I couldn’t believe I was still alive.”
His family started a Go-Fund-Me to help get him a new truck.
To donate, search Tim’s truck totaled by a tornado.
