Baxter the wonder beagle
survives tornado

Toby Hines' house: not so lucky

By Wayne Wood

Toby Hines wasn’t home when the tornado hit. His wife, Michelle wasn’t home. Kids Rachael, 13, and Jordan, 11, weren’t home.
So his first concern was his beagle, Baxter.
Hines, who works the second shift in the Electrical Shop of VUMC Plant Operations, had left his Gallatin home and was on his way to work when the devastating tornado of Friday, April 7, struck.
“When I got to work we watched the news and saw something about [the destruction of] Vol State [Community College] and the car dealerships,” he says. And he knew that those places were very near his house. “That’s when I got worried,” he says.
Worried about his house? Well, sure. But really worried about Baxter, the 4-year-old hound who was in his crate inside the house.
Hines first called an uncle who lived nearby and asked if he could check on the house, but the uncle had suffered a tragedy of his own, as his son-in-law had been killed by the tornado.
Hines was still absorbing that terrible news when he saw a helicopter-camera shot of his neighborhood on television. He stared at the screen, oriented himself with the neighborhood landmarks, and then felt the pit of his stomach drop.
“I called my wife and said, ‘The house is gone,’” he remembers. “I freaked out. I bought the house brand new three years ago. It was the first house I bought—and we actually had a contract to sell it.”
More on that in a minute.
Michelle was the first family member to make it back to the house, at about 7 that night. The children went to spend the night at a relative’s house, and the damage and roadblocks by local authorities made it difficult for Toby to get back to his neighborhood.
And there was Baxter the beagle. Apparently the collapse of the house had sprung him from his crate, and a neighbor had found him wandering near the rubble of his home. So he wouldn’t wander off, the neighbor had created a makeshift leash and tied him up. Except for a small puncture wound, which a vet looked at later that night, Baxter took a direct hit from a tornado and survived unscathed.
The house did not.

“Most of our stuff was across the street,” Hines says. “My stuff, my neighbors’—there was nothing left. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I mean, you see it on TV…” and his voice fades with the thought. This wasn’t TV; this was his life.
It was a rough night, the first of many. Michelle and Toby spent that night at Toby’s parents’ house in Gallatin.
“We just held each other and cried,” he says.
“My kids had a hard time understanding it. My daughter wanted to know where her bed was, where her Orlando Bloom posters were.”
There was no good answer, other than “gone.”
But in the midst of those hard days, there was a silver lining of the even worse what-might-have-been: “If that had come through in the middle of the night it would have killed us.”
Beyond the shock of losing his home, tempered with the joy and thankfulness of knowing that his family—including the beagle—was safe, the Hines’ were immediately faced with the mundane, but necessary, task of dealing with insurance.
“We spent two weeks trying to list the contents of the house,” he says. Trying to remember everything was especially difficult.
“If I have one piece of advice, it’s know what’s in your house,” he says. “Videotape everything.”
But with that task behind him, things began moving forward again. The buyer who had already agreed to buy the now-destroyed house agreed to buy the now bare lot and rebuild, so with the proceeds from insurance and the sale of the property, the Hines’ are able to buy a new place.
You may call it a happy ending, and in a way it is, but don’t think it’s a happy ending that was worth the pain of that terrible day and its aftermath.
“I don’t EVER want to go through this again,” Hines says.