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New business fights to survive after Sand Springs tornado

Update: The owners of the Daylight Donuts shop reached out to the owners of Tanglewood Nurseries to help them with the donut wreckage.

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Many businesses are working hard to rebuild after last Wednesday’s deadly tornado, and the owners of Tanglewood Nurseries in Sand Springs certainly have their work cut out for them.

Diane Hardy owns the business with her husband, Bruce. She said she would have liked to see the tornado that tore up their property, but was too scared fighting the winds on her way to shelter to look up.

“There was hail and wind and it just moved in incredibly fast,” Hardy said. “It sounds like what everybody says. It sounds like a train. It is so deafening and so amazing. So amazing.”

Hardy and her family survived but their business was mostly destroyed.

“As soon as we slammed the lid, we heard a loud bang and that was the (work)shop landing on top of it,” Hardy said.

The front end of Tanglewood Nurseries is covered with twisted metal, chairs and other donut shop remnants from the Daylight Donuts that had been across the street, but Hardy says they haven't heard from the owner yet.

Their nurseries were founded in 2010, though the land has been in the family since the 1940s.

As owners of a new nursery, the Hardy’s were unable to obtain insurance for most for their business, aside from insuring some equipment. Tanglewood Nurseries’ 18-foot-tall greenhouse was built with the strongest framing the Hardy’s could get their hands on, but the F2 still “folded it like a cheap lawn chair.”

"We lost some big trees,” Hardy said. “And of course, we lost our greenhouse. It’s gone completely.”

Hardy credits KRMG for saving her family’s lives.

“We were coming home from shopping, about a mile from here, and KRMG announced there were tornadoes coming from the Mannford area heading toward Sand Springs, and to take shelter,” Hardy said. “I called my mother-in-law, said get to the storm shelter, we hopped off the highway, grabbed our dogs, got in the storm shelter and it hit two seconds later.”

Friends and family dropped by on Sunday, to help in the clean-up effort.

“It’s going to be a while before everything is picked up,” Hardy said.

Despite no insurance coverage and months of work ahead, the owners of Tanglewood Nurseries are optimistic about reopening one day.

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