WELLINGTON -- Forty-eight hours after the tornado, Sam Rider was still in tears.
The twister had ripped the roof off his home in Rustic Ranches, a community in the horse country off Flying Cow Road, with a terrifying sound.
"It was like a mortar shock with 100 explosions all around us," he recalled Friday.
Then a ceiling beam fell on him as the winds filled the house. His son, Geronimo, pulled him up and they tried to hide in a bedroom closet. Their combined body weight wasn't enough to close the door.
The wind blew away their air-conditioning shaft that sat in the closet -- and then it lifted Sam Rider himself off the floor.
Geronimo caught his dad by the arm and held on to him until the tornado passed.
"Come down to the floor, Dad," Rider recalled his son pleading. "Come on down, Dad."
And then it stopped. He'd survived the scariest two minutes of his life.
"I didn't think anyone could survive one of these," Rider said.
Hurricane Milton spawned the tornado that plowed through Wellington's western edge at about 4:30 p.m. Wednesday before the storm made landfall on Siesta Key along the Gulf Coast. Wellington Mayor Michael Napoleon said it left much of the residential and equestrian communities along the village's western edge unrecognizable.
The tornado, Napoleone said, left about 20 homes uninhabitable and at least another 50 had sustained major damage.
Flanked by high-end homes and horse barns, the houses in Rustic Ranches were among the first to feel the effects of the tornado that flipped cars, downed power lines and ripped trees from the ground.
Rider and his son were tracking Milton's path on the radio from their home when an alarm warned two tornadoes were approaching Wellington. The last thing he heard was a call for everyone south on Southern Boulevard to take shelter -- that it was a matter of life or death.
Then the roof came apart and sent everything inside the house flying.
When they walked outside after the tornado passed, Rider couldn't recognize what was left of their house. And he couldn't find the family van. The winds had scooped it up and it landed on its roof more than a block away.
Two days after the tornado, Rider is back at his house, which is covered in trees and debris.
Rider said Geronimo, who is an avid polo player, has a match Sunday and the family hopes to support him if he participates. The family has received an outpouring of support from members of the community who have shown up to help them.
"It's been very emotional," Rider said, choking on tears, adding: "We survived. We had zero defense."
Valentina Palm covers Royal Palm Beach, Wellington, Greenacres, Palm Springs and other western communities in Palm Beach County for The Palm Beach Post. Email her at vpalm@pbpost.com and follow her on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, at @ValenPalmB. Support local journalism:Subscribe today.