When the wind howled louder than the tornado sirens, Melissa Leisey knew it was time to take cover.

The Lititz native ran into her dormitory at Union University in Jackson, Tenn., and packed into a first floor bathroom with five other women, waiting for the storm to pass.

She sat on the toilet, praying and holding hands with Laura Spotts, her roommate and fellow Lancaster County native, who crouched on the edge of the sink.

For a moment everything went silent.

Then the pressure dropped so drastically that Spotts felt a heavy weight push her down from the sink. The moment she jumped to the floor, ceiling tiles rained on the six students, who covered their heads with a blanket.

In just 35 seconds the tornado that roared through the university campus around 7 p.m. Tuesday demolished nearly half of its buildings, tore down concrete walls, swirled cars into the sky and trapped two dozen students in the rubble.

"It felt like a really long 35 seconds," Leisey said this morning from the home of another roommate's grandparents 30 miles outside of Jackson, where she and Spotts are staying.

When the shaking stopped, Spotts opened the bathroom door and surveyed the damage.

"The furniture was all over the room," she recalled today. "Windows were blown out. Blinds were all mangled like someone just flew through them."

The damage Tuesday to Union University, a Baptist college of 3,200 students, was caused by one of a series of devastating storms that killed more than 50 people across the South.

Safe inside the bathroom with her friends, Spotts shut the door and told the others not to budge. But rescue crews beckoned the students to get out.

Outside, refrigerators and couches littered the sidewalks.

"I didn't look up at our room," Spotts said. The women shared a suite on the second floor of the building where they hid.

"I just wanted to focus on all of us getting out," she said, recalling how she maneuvered through the rubble in flip-flops and tried to avoid glass and knocked-down power lines along the way.

Another Lancaster native, senior Stephanie Lantz, had to crawl out of her dorm, Leisey said. Lantz' roommates reported that she was safe and unhurt.

Union's president said Tuesday's storm was 15 times worse than a tornado that hit the campus in 2002.

Classes are canceled until Feb. 18 and rescue crews begin the clean up effort today.

Leisey and Spotts, both 19-year-old sophomores, expect that today for the first time they will be permitted to go back to their dorm and see what, if anything, remains of their possessions.

They are anxious about what they will find.

"There's part of me still hoping..." Spotts said, wishing that her computer's hard drive can be salvaged, that some personal mementos were somehow spared.

Some of their walls are still standing, Spotts told her father on Wednesday. The room next door, where the girls lived last year, is wholly collapsed.

Leisey graduated from Lititz Christian School in 2006, the same year Spotts graduated from Warwick High School.

Both girls attend Grace Brethren Church in Lititz, which has already sent them money for necessities.

On Wednesday, Leisey and Spotts were able to go to Target and buy toiletries and underwear. A stranger in the store who noticed that Spotts was wearing only a T-shirt, jeans and flip-flops bought her a new coat.

"It's neat the way people pull together when tragedy hits," Tim Spotts, the student's father, said today. "It's stuff like that — that's how you handle it."

Tim and Kim Spotts were watching American Idol Tuesday night when their daughter called with the news.

She said: "Mom, if you turn on the news, we just got hit by a tornado. That's about all I told her."

But in a more frank conversation on Wednesday, Spotts told her father, "If we hadn't gotten into that bathroom as quick as we did, well, we probably wouldn't be here," he recalled.

"It's surreal," said Daryl Leisey, Melissa's father.

"The probability of it happening is so small. We've been watching a lot of pictures and video. You see other people's tragedy."

"But when your daughter calls and says 'hey, this is what happened, my dorm's gone..." he said. "It's just surreal."

Union University has set up a Disaster Relief Fund at 1050 Union University Drive, Jackson, TN 38305.

Updates are available at http://uuemergency.blogspot.com.

CONTACT US: alitvak@LNPnews.com or 481-6020