Northampton couple come home from holiday to find their roof torn up by freak tornado

Homeowner Steve Abraham and his wife came home form a getaway in Dorset to find their house had been hit by a tornado.

It was the homecoming everyone dreads for one couple this weekend after he came back to Northampton from a holiday only to find a tornado had torn up his roof.

Steve Abrahams thought his neighbours were pulling his leg when they called him on Saturday night (July 25) to say a twister had just swept over his home in

But he couldn't argue with the pictures they sent soon after that showed his front lawn speckled with broken roof tiles and wood from his fascia boards.

Other neighbours were also hit by the twister. One family even watched their car slide two feet along the road on its own.

Finally, Steve and his wife could only return from their getaway in Dorset on Sunday night to see full extent of the damage - including a hole in their roof and a chunk of the brickwork from their second storey missing.

Steve told the Chronicle & Echo: "There are between 30 and 35 tornados in the UK every year and one of them happened to go over my house. I ought to buy lottery tickets.

"I had a phone call from my neighbour while I was away telling me about the carnage. They said how they watched the tornado coming up the street.

"We just couldn't believe it. I called my wife and said 'the house has been hit by a tornado'. She just looked at me as if to say 'no it has not'."

Steve estimates the damage to his property could be more than £5,000.

It includes a hole in the roof and a crack through the brickwork caused by debris hurled away by the twister.

Meanwhile, Steve's neighbours on Home Farm Drive have also felt the impact of Saturday's freak weather.

Several families could only watch as their fence panels were torn down.

One homeowner, Holly Marriott, was even called by her husband while she was out on Saturday to hear that their window had been smashed and their parked BMW had been shifted two feet into the middle of the road.

Holly said: "My husband said how everything jsut got really dark and stormy outside. The wind blew so hard it slammed a window shut and broke it.

"All the children's toys in the back garden were swept up into one corner, and quite a few of them were broken.

"No one has been hurt though. We all helped each other out afterwards."

Hundreds of eyewitnesses caught sight of the twister at around 8pm on Saturday (July 25) as it blew through the north of the town.It wrecked havoc on the community gardens at Moulton Allotments, where more than 30 sheds and six greenhouses all worth thousands of pounds were destroyed in a matter of seconds.