Wyoming People: Andrew Gregory Survived A Tornado Dropping A Warehouse On Him

If the Olympics awarded people for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Andrew Gregory would be a gold medalist.

The rural Wyoming husband and father still can’t work and continues to recover from injuries suffered June 23 when a large tornado brought an industrial coal mine service building on top of him.

The category EF2 twister plowed through the main staging area of the North Antelope Rochelle mine in northeast Wyoming. It was 6:07 p.m. and Gregory, along with an estimated 400-600 of his coworkers, were in a shift change at the time.

With almost no warning, Gregory said he quickly dove under a fuel truck for safety.

“I have never been so scared in my entire life,” Gregory told Cowboy State Daily from his home in Keeline, Wyoming, a small community between Douglas and Lusk about 110 miles southeast of the mine.

Gregory, 47, said he and a coworker found some defense under that fuel truck and that they “held on for dear life.”

After the powerful twister had passed, the mine’s staging area was in chaos and reminded Gregory of a war zone. Along with leveling the building, it flipped semitrailers and buses and took 12 rail cars of their track. It wrecked cars and pushed them around a parking lot. Utility poles toppled.

He suffered a significant injury to his right leg — at first doctors believed his femur was broken — and that entire side of his body was left bruised, swollen and Gregory was hardly able to move.

But he’s alive, along with all of his coworkers. Despite the potential for the tornado to be a major human tragedy, nobody died.

“It’s a miracle,” Gregory said.

At Which Point Is It More Than Bad Luck?

Gregory’s brushes with natural disasters began early in life growing up in Washington state. That’s when he suffered through the aftermath of the eruption of Mount St. Helens.

In 2001, he survived a powerful magnitude 6.8 earthquake that shook up western Washington. It caused billions of dollars in damage.

Then just a couple of years ago in Wyoming, lightning struck the family’s house.

It’s enough to make anybody wonder what the universe has against him.

Not Gregory. A man of strong faith, he said that he’s survived these close calls with Mother Nature’s fury are positive signs, not negative.

Instead of being discouraged by his close call, “I thank God for it,” he said. “I had just become a grandpa, my daughter had a baby on (June) 13^th.”

He recalls scrambling out from under that fuel truck and, despite his injuries, looking around at the mayhem left behind and making a joke. He looked at a coworker and quipped, “This is what happens when you say God’s name in vain.”

Gregory said he would always playfully chide his coworkers about taking the Lord’s name in vain and couldn’t pass up the opportunity for the ultimate I-told-you-so.

Gregory’s wife Jennifer said enough is enough, and laid down the law during the pair’s interview with Cowboy State Daily: “No more natural disasters for you.”

Several Minutes Of Terror

But before he could make that joke, Gregory said, he faced what he thought was his certain death. He could see it; he could hear its roar.

“We just got back at the end of the day and I was getting ready to request some time off because we’re doing the state fair with our food truck,” he said. “I was texting my wife and she said to be careful, that there were weather warnings out there.”

That’s when he noticed the storm system and immediately realized the danger.

“We seen it coming,” Gregory said. “All of the sudden you see the power lines go and were flashing. It took the power lines down.”

He said he and a lot of other coworkers retreated back into the fueling building.

“When they closed the doors, I ran back and tried to find somewhere to go, and I couldn’t find somewhere to go,” Gregory said. “That’s when the roof came down on us in the wash bay.”

The falling debris struck while he was making a break to hide under the fuel truck,

“When I was going to that semi, something hit me, and it hit me fast,” Gregory said. “I don’t know what it was, I just know that it hit me, and it hit me hard.”

Although in pain, Gregory said instinct took over.

“I’ve never been so scared in my life. It was so loud. All I could do was hold on for dear life,” he said. “I honestly thought that field truck was going to tip over. The only thing that saved me was there was 5,000 gallons of fuel on that truck weighing it down.”

After what Gregory said seemed like forever (but was actually probably just minutes), he crawl