By Robert Tomlinson
News Director
THREE RIVERS — Aubrey McKenzie has been scared of storms ever since she was a child.
However, for the Mendon native, a bar and service manager at the Applebee’s restaurant in Three Rivers, those fears were the furthest thing from her mind on March 6.
McKenzie has been hailed by some as a hero for her quick thinking on that afternoon, when she helped lead over 50 customers and employees – and even a dog – to safety as the EF-2 tornado ripped through the Three Rivers area, just two doors down from the Menards building that was severely damaged.
“I’m just glad I had the team that I had with me and we were able to work as a team to get everything the way it turned out,” McKenzie said. “It hit so fast and so unexpectedly. I’m glad that everybody was able to get somewhere somewhat safe and able to walk away and tell their story.”
McKenzie was on duty at Applebee’s the day of the tornado. Due to what she called the “beautiful” weather earlier in the day, she and her coworkers, including the restaurant manager, were surprised when the initial tornado warning came in a little after 3 p.m.
“When we got the tornado warning, we’re like, ‘Aw, there’s no way, like, it’s beautiful outside.’ And then it turned serious very, very quickly,” McKenzie said.
She recalled the restaurant manager was about to leave and go to the Applebee’s in Battle Creek they managed, and they talked about the storm just before the manager left.
“I said, ‘Oh, I’ve seen plenty of watches and warnings, I’m not too worried about it,’” McKenzie said. “And then you walk back inside, and then everybody’s phone was going off, and that’s when the panic started to set in for me.”
McKenzie, who was now in charge at that point with their manager having left, described the alerts going off on the phones as a “concert of beeping” in the building. She then looked out the window and saw the funnel cloud right outside the window.
“My first thought was, where do we go? Where do I take myself and everybody else? And I just thought immediately just to go the back of the building. So, I took them all to our prep kitchen,” McKenzie said. “It wasn’t that easy getting everybody into the prep kitchen. There were guests, there was my cooks and my servers, at one point there was a pitbull in there.”
During the process of getting people to safety, McKenzie also had to bring in a couple of people from outside.
“Once they all got back there, I went out and I peeked my head out one last time and there was a pickup truck outside of the side door. And I went out there and he has his dog and I said, ‘Come inside,’ like yelling at him to come inside,” McKenzie said. “He came inside, and then there was a little boy sitting by himself on a phone, I think he was waiting for his dad or something, I don’t know, but I grabbed his arm and dragged him to the back and everything.”
With everyone in the vicinity sheltered, McKenzie and the others in the kitchen could feel the storm passing right by them, right after the storm tore through Menards.
“You could hear things hitting the building. Your ears were popping, like, you could feel the pressure of the wind and everything, even from inside the building. Even though you can’t feel the wind hitting your face, you can feel it,” McKenzie said. “Your ears were popping, but then you could also hear the glass shattering from the dining room. It’s exactly how you would imagine it would be standing in the middle of a tornado. Shattering, like things hitting everything. It sounded like a freight train.”
When the storm passed five minutes later, McKenzie described the scene as “devastating.” The windows in the restaurant broke, the bar rail was in “disarray,” cars were damaged, and pieces of the roof of Menards were strewn about. McKenzie took video of the scene immediately after everyone was out of shelter.
“Everybody was just looking around in shock, like, that really just happened,” McKenzie said. “You take shelter and get a secret tour of Applebee’s and coming out to that, it was crazy.”
Her manager came back soon after the storm passed, McKenzie said, apologizing for leaving the team there, but McKenzie forgave him, recalling replying, “How were you supposed to know? We literally said, we’ve seen plenty of warnings in our lifetime, we never expected it.”
McKenzie said it took three days of cleanup to get the restaurant back in a workable state, cleaning up glass and sweeping and vacuuming dirt and debris. She said she had to “think outside the box” when cleaning to make sure everything was accounted for.
“You had to like take apart the booths and you had to pull the booths away from the wall. We already do that once a week, but it was something we didn’t think about, like, oh my gosh, glass got in there and glass got under that part of the booth. Oh, there’s glass in this table,” McKenzie said. “Even though the window that broke was clear across the restaurant, and the amount of dirt everywhere, it was crazy. I had to use six different buckets of water cause it was just got so mucky. I had to buy two new whole vacuums because of some carpets.”
She said the cleanup process around the town in the aftermath of the tornado was “inspiring” to see.
“It shows you that we are all standing together. We all did survive this and we are all getting through it together,” McKenzie said.
McKenzie feels her experience in the restaurant industry prepared her for quickly thinking on her feet to get people to safety during the tornado.
“Somebody had said something to me about, working in the restaurant industry might’ve helped me be so fast paced and a quick thinker in that moment,” McKenzie said. “Coming into a Friday shift, you’re about to be ticket to ticket, plate to plate, table to table, and that translated into, ‘What do I do right now?’”
In the end, McKenzie had one takeaway from the entire experience.
“I never want to set foot within the vicinity of a tornado again,” McKenzie said.
Robert Tomlinson can be reached at 279-7488 or robert@wilcoxnewspapers.com.
