After a powerful tornado barreled through Enid, Okla., on April 23, the Sloat family was trapped beneath the earth in their storm shelter under tons of debris when they were suddenly rescued — by their two pet goats.
“They saved us,” Adam Sloat, 53, told The Post. “No doubt about it.”
The terrifying ordeal began when the approaching storm triggered a rare tornado emergency, the National Weather Service’s highest tornado warning.
The bad news: a powerful EF-4 tornado — with winds reaching between 170-200 mph — was bearing down on the 50,000 residents of Enid at a few minutes past 8 p.m.
“We were relaxing, watching the NFL draft on TV when the signal went off,” recalled Sloat.
The roar swelled into a deafening howl, rattling the walls and exploding windows as the monster twister closed in.
“It sounded like a freight train,” said Sloat, a fitness trainer at nearby Vance Air Force Base. “I told my wife Mary, and my teenage daughter, ‘Grab everything you can and let’s get into the storm shelter.'”
As the Sloats raced into their underground hideaway, neighbors Eddie and Linda rushed to join them.
They barely slammed the cellar doors shut before the half-mile-wide tornado chewed through everything above them as it raced through Enid for 10 menacing miles.
“There was glass shattering, we could hear bricks falling,” Mary, 52, later told local news station KFOR.
She was heartbreakingly sure their 3-year-old pet goats, Percy and Penny, would never survive the violent twister.
They jumped when a loud crash sounded on the shelter’s steel doors.
“We looked up and saw the door was dented in. We didn’t know it at the time, but the chimney fell on top of the doors, thousands of bricks,” said Sloat.
When the storm passed, they were still alive — but unable to escape, trapped beneath mountains of debris.
“We called the 911 first responder team on my wife’s phone when it still had a signal and we learned later they arrived about 30 minutes after the tornado passed, but they had no idea where we were or if we were even around,” said Sloat. “They’d never hear us.”
The rescuers walked and searched, but couldn’t locate the survivors.
Then — just when hope was fading — a faint sound from above the rubble reached them.
“My daughter and I could have sworn that we heard goat noises, and I thought there’s no way,” Sloat said.
Against all odds, Percy and Penny had survived, and the four-legged heroes stomped, bleated and refused to budge from where the family and friends sat, buried alive.
“The rescuers had no idea where we were but Percy and Penny knew,” laughed Sloat. “They stood right over us and kept up a steady stream of noise until the emergency people came over and started removing the bricks.”
The Sloat family and their neighbors was eventually pulled to safety.
“We finally emerged and couldn’t believe our eyes,” said Adam. “Everything was gone, and there were first responders walking around. One firefighter said to me, ‘We had no idea where you were until we saw your goats.'”
The twister had ripped roofs off buildings, knocked down power poles and blocked roads in the small town, but fortunately, there were only minor injuries, according to the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office.
Weather chaos continued to rip through “tornado alley” — which spans the central plains of the US from Texas into South Dakota — in the next weeks.
Now, as the Sloats begin the grueling work of rebuilding, they still have something to laugh and wonder about.
“On days whenever they’re being ornery and they headbutt me, or they nip at my fingers, I’m going to have to remember this,” said Mary. “I don’t know of anybody else who has a goat story like this.”
