Longwood Neighborhood Marks One Year Since EF-2 Tornado, Still Rebuilding

A year after an EF-2 tornado tore through Longwood's Whispering Winds neighborhood on March 10, 2025, residents are still measuring recovery in what they can no longer unsee. Personal belongings scattered across yards. A house on Blue Iris Place reduced to rubble. Pool screens and fences strewn across streets that, today, look almost nothing like they did that morning.

The National Weather Service reported the tornado touched down around 9:35 a.m. with winds reaching 120 miles per hour. Seminole County said more than 50 homes were damaged and one was destroyed when the Blue Iris Place structure collapsed while a couple inside took cover. No one was seriously injured.

"You find their personal belongings from their home scattered everywhere," said Emily Sless, who first walked News 6 through the neighborhood damage in 2025.

For residents still living in Whispering Winds, the anniversary is less a milestone than a reminder. One neighbor, identified only as Behar, said the storm's grip on daily life has not loosened. "I still look back, and any time it's really windy, I start to get a little bit of heart palpitations," Behar said. "It's still very surreal."

The emotional weight sits alongside a transformed streetscape. Behar described the community as now unrecognizable from what it was on March 10, 2025, and said surviving the storm reshaped something more fundamental than property. "It's very jarring to think about the fact that we were in a tornado, especially an EF-2," Behar said. "I think it really helped me have a different perspective on life and how short it can be."

The county's response was immediate and large-scale. Seminole County public works, roads, and stormwater crews logged 2,253 hours over nine days clearing the neighborhood, hauling enough debris to fill 488 trucks. Alan Harris, Seminole County's Emergency Manager, said the operation mirrored a familiar playbook. "We really responded very similar to a hurricane, but much smaller," Harris said.

Harris also used the one-year mark to reinforce preparedness guidance, noting that strong cold fronts can produce tornadoes with little warning across Seminole County. "Know where you're going to go. Interior room. Lower level, away from any windows and doors," he said.

Richard Grelecki, another Whispering Winds resident who survived the tornado, spoke with Spectrum News 13 for its one-year coverage but chose to do so off camera, declining to share his story publicly in the immediate aftermath.

Previous reporting noted that cleanup continued after what one headline described as a four-mile path of destruction, a figure that has not been independently confirmed through a National Weather Service damage survey in the materials available. What the county's numbers do confirm is the scale of the effort required: five minutes of EF-2 winds generated nine days of sustained government cleanup work and a neighborhood still in the process of putting itself back together.