Packet on Wisconsin Tornadoes (by group)
Group 1
The Viroqua Tornado June 28th, 1865
The salesman John M. Bennet from Viroqua, Wisconsin, always studied the
weather. When he--in the morning of June 28, 1865--was on his way home from
a business trip, he saw something he later wrote about in his diary: "In the
morning about sunrise, dark low skies passed fast over me. There was a light
wind from the south. There was a valley, and he should pass it." He wrote that
the
valley was much warmer than normal on this time of year. "At 8 am, the light
wind
came back. It was getting warmer. There were growing cumulus clouds. At about
12 noon, it was even more warmer, and there was a lot of cumulus. My horse was
very sweaty. Came to Viroqua at 1pm." What Bennet had seen, was a collection
of elements, that before the day was over, had nearly killed him. At 3 pm, was
the
air was so hot, that he felt he was in the rain clouds. At 3:45, lightning in
the
horizon warned the people about a thunderstorm 2-4 miles northwest of town.
Another storm was sighted in the southeast. Then we saw a dark and stretched
storm cloud directly in the west, that was going to the south, and another was
heading north. We had never seen a tornado, but we knew that the clouds before
it circled. Bennet was standing in his garden when the tornado was developing
in a thick black cloud. Its rotation was so fast, that it just took 2-3 seconds
for
it to take one round about itself. Its forward motion was about 1 mile in a
minute.
West of Viroqua and in the storm's path, there was a canyon, with 60 foot
high cliffs. The tornado got in the canyon, and it seemed that it was trapped.
The vortex took a break, and after that, it got out of it. The main funnel was
not
on the ground, but Bennet saw, what he called "branches" coming down from the
funnel and circled around it (multiple vortices). They destroyed some houses,
and one of them was a new strong building , that Herman Greve had build. That
day he had a lot of wool, that was not in bags yet. The building was totally
destroyed, and the wool was sucked up in the air. Bennet, his wife, their
daughter
and her six-year-old daughter, was going down in the basement with death on
their heels. Mrs. Bennet was nearly get hit by a falling chimney. Bennet's house
was being destroyed, and he was laying under a lot of timber so he could not
move. His leg was broken right over the angle. Bennet's horse was 45 feet from
the house, and it was sucked up by the vortex and thrown over to the house, and
it was right beside Bennet, so he could breath in its face. The tornado was
moving forward over Viroqua, and it killed 17 people. Then the multiple vortices
ran together and made one tornado that was moving to the east. Two miles out
in open field, there was a school. When the help came to the school, there were
five dead children, and the teacher also was injured, holding a deadly injured
girl in her hands. When the tornado moved to the West Kickapoo, it "ran" up
over a 300 foot high cliff. After the cliff, it was not touching the ground, and
from there it traveled as a funnel cloud. It was last seen after 4 pm as a dark
scary cloud, from where there was falling wool, as if it was snow.
From Connie Stephen, Vernon County Historical Museum.
Book: "History of Vernon County, Wisconsin." Union Publishing Co. 1884.
Submitted by Simon Holm Andersen.
Homepage: home13.inet.tele.dk/skypumpe
From Significant Tornadoes: Moved ENE from SW of Viroqua, devastating the
southern part of that town, passing south of Rockton and dissipating in a six
mile
wide downburst near the Juneau County line. Approaching Viroqua, the funnel
was accompanied by a "branch whirl holding on like a parasite." Multiple vortex
"branches" and "eddies" were observed as the tornado passed through town. Ten
people were killed on one street. A death toll of 17 is usually given for this
tornado
but according to the History of Vernon County, at least 13 people were
killed in
Viroqua and as many as 12 others may have died later from injuries. The tornado
was moving at an estimated 60 mph as it approached a schoolhouse 2 miles east
of Viroqua containing a teacher and 24 students. The building was lifted into
the
air and "dashed to the ground", killing the teacher and eight students. Timbers
one foot-square timbers were carried "long distances; tree tops were filled with
feather beds, chairs, and clothing; all kinds of livestock were either dead or
writhing on the points of the broken branches; 20-ton rocks were rolled, lifted
and broken."
Final Statistics: 22 killed and at least 100 injured. Path width: 300 yards.
Path
length: 30 miles.
The tornado was not rated by the Tornado Project but based on the destruction
of the schoolhouse it would likely be rated an F4.
“Tornadoes of Wisconsin.” 10 October 2004. Available online:
http://www.wx-fx.com/tornado.htm
Group 2
Sitting on the Willow River, New
Richmond, a prosperous town of 2500 people,
was considered one of the prettiest places on the Wisconsin Central line. June
12th was a Monday and the streets were filled with residents and outsiders alike
waiting for the afternoon circus parade. Further west, a deep low pressure area
was pushing east across the Dakotas, and a Mr Outram of the Weather Bureau
issued a warning for the possibility of violent rain and wind storms or cyclones
(tornadoes), though as was written then, "...men are slow to believe they might
be the unwilling victims of like disasters."
An excellent eyewitness account of the tornado's formation from Dr.
O. F. Thomas of Lakeland:
It was warm and oppressive that afternoon, and around four o'clock, clouds
began to gather in the west and overspread the sky. It rained briskly for twenty
minutes, hailstones mixed with the rain but they were not large and there were
not many of them. The sky cleared somewhat in the southwest, leaving only a
thin haze, of the color of the fleecy clouds sometimes seen on a fair day. Upon
this was a singularly formed cloud. Lowering and dark, it had a well defined
margin at the base, but with the upper part less distinct, as it had some other
dark clouds for a background. What appeared the most peculiar were two
inverted cones which hung from its eastern end. The westward cone suddenly
lengthened out three or four times its original length then suddenly drew back
while the rest of the cloud seemed in violent commotion. This was repeated three
or four times while the whole formation was moving rapidly to the east. The
cloud
formation did not extend to the earth until it reached the lake (Lake St Croix),
and
not for sometime after, for the water could plainly be seen rising from the
surface
before the clouds reached it from above, thus showing that there may be great
disturbances on the ground while the cyclone is still in the air. The
appearance
of the water rising in the air was perfectly white, like a heavy spray or
stream. It
spread out as it rose, and in a very short time, perhaps half a minute, the
cloud
reached and enveloped it, and all was black to the surface of the water. At this
time, the point of cloud resting upon the water seemed to be about two hundred
feet across, in the shape of a half-opened fan, and moved rapidly toward the
north,
directly up the lake. Continuing thus for about one mile, it suddenly turned to
the
east, passing up a bank, and leaving a track of broken and twisted trees. It
continued on its frightful journey until it was lost from view on the
northeastern
horizon. As it went from us we could see that it increased in volume and
violence.
Occasionally, it would bound from the ground and continue its fearful whirling
through the air, while great masses of black vapor, left behind, would jump from
the ground and join the mass above.
The storm moved northeast and may have merged near Boardman with another
storm which crossed from Stillwater, Minnesota--a storm which had already
caused considerable damage there. It damaged numerous farms along its path,
and at the Garrett Lacey farm, "all the buildings were swept away so clean that
there was not enough stuff left to build a fire with." Horses and farm animals
were
swept up and thrown to their deaths, some wrapped in telegraph wires.
At this time, many people were on the streets and along the sidewalks of New
Richmond, soon to be heading home for dinner. As the storm bore down upon
the town, panic and confusion broke out. People ran through the streets
shouting,
"We are doomed! A cyclone is coming! Flee to your cellars!" The noise of the
approaching funnel grew louder and the darkness deeper. One by one, buildings
were wrenched and and twisted from their foundations, crushed and scattered by
the relentless winds. The roar was so deafening beneath the vortex that the
cracking and crashing of buildings, the banging of tin roofs, the falling thuds
of
masonry, and the bombardment of the earth with timbers, trees, iron machinery,
and every movable object, were not distinguishable but lost in the greater roar
of
the elements. To observers further away, the destruction was like rapid
detonations
of thunder, or the cracking of many rifles in battle, heard in the midst of the
deeper,
constant roaring. One man, who had the presence of mind to hide in an open
cistern, had looked up into the funnel but said it was impossible to see
anything.
The air was simply a stifling whirling darkness.
Silence followed the din as the sky cast an eerie green light upon town.
People
emerged from cellars in a daze, faces blackened, eyes and clothing filled with
mud,
many streaming with blood. For a width of about half a mile, extending the
length of
the city, not a building was left standing. The substantial brick and timber
buildings
on Main Street had been demolished or swept away. The iron bridge spanning the
Willow River lay in a twisted heap on the southeast bank. The Methodist church
had been tossed across the street. The power station, which also housed the
library
and the council rooms, had been leveled to the ground floor. The water tower had
been carried off, and lumber from the mill yard had been strewn for miles.
People
from the east and west sides of town, where some houses still stood, ran first
to
Main Street to this devastation which was littered with dead and mangled human
forms. It was soon realized that hundreds more might be buried under the piles
of rubble. Fires broke out in several places almost at once. Some of the buried
managed to free themselves in the face of the approaching flames but many
more were not so lucky.
At the Bell and Smith market, Arthur Smith found himself in the basement,
supporting the bricks of the shattered chimney with his shoulders and was so
deeply covered, he could not see out. Bent nearly double, his arms were free
though there was very little space to work with and he did not know when the
pile of bricks might collapse upon him. But he set his teeth, and carefully
working and feeling his way, he drew out bricks and piled them under his
feet until he succeeded in getting out. Badly bruised, he nevertheless set
about freeing others trapped in the rubble until dense smoke drove him from
the place. He said that knowing he was leaving others to the flames, was like
an unspeakable nightmare.
In the wake of the tornado came a second wind storm which blew sticks and
fragments about and knocked people from their feet. With it came the "heaviest
downpour of rain that has ever visited this section of the country." Streets
became
seas of mud but the rains did little to slow the relentless fires which burned
and
crept along the heaps of rubble. Men set to work, digging through the ruins,
urged on by the voices--half crazed with pain--of those imprisoned. The injured
were carried away on doors and shutters and other improvised litters to any
place offering shelter. It was taken for granted that anyone with a roof over
their heads were willing to share it. A common greeting that night and for many
days after was, "I am glad to see you alive."
With the electric plant destroyed and few lanterns available, rescuers were
forced to grope their way through piles of rubble, pitfalls, and dark holes
gouged in the ground, guided only by the flames devouring the ruins. Putting
the fires out that night was virtually impossible. The city water works was
destroyed, all the hydrants and pumps twisted off, and the wells and the river
bed filled with debris. With all the telephone and telegraphic lines severed,
help and rescue would not arrive until the following day after riders managed
to spread word of the devastation. So through that night, men worked long
past exhaustion, lines of them pulling at ropes that lifted a heavy timber or
a section of wall to an eerie refrain of "Heav-o, heav-o." No less busy were
the doctors who treated the injured and dying with virtually no medical
supplies. Sheets became bandages, storm debris became splints, any
building with a roof a hospital.
Relief began to arrive the following day when trains loaded with supplies,
nurses and doctors, fire-fighting equipment, and much needed manpower
reached the city. With it came the curious, the ghoulish, and the criminal
which are sadly part of every great disaster.
Final statistics: 117 killed, over 200 hundred injured. Tornado path
length: 30 miles; width up to 300 yards. Damage exceeded $300,000.
Tornado was rated F5 by the Tornado Project.
Click here to view more photos.
References: A Modern Herculaneum by Anna Hoyt Epley.
“Tornadoes of Wisconsin.” 10 October 2004. Available online:
http://www.wx-fx.com/tornado.htm
Group 3
Tornadoes are not confined only
to spring and summer but may occur
almost any month of the year. Late season outbreaks, although rare, are
often violent and devastating. Low-topped convection in the form of squall
lines or supercells are spawned by the strong low and middle level winds
which often exceed 100 miles per hour. Strong shearing in the atmosphere
between levels can create a favorable environment for tornadoes even if
heat and humidity are marginal.
November 11th, 1911 was unseasonably warm with temperatures into the
seventies reaching southern Wisconsin. Strong southerly winds gusted
throughout the afternoon. Around 4pm, storms raced across Rock County
catching most of the residents unawares, spawning a tornado that cut an
18 mile long swath of destruction followed by drenching rains. To add to
the misery of the storm victims, sleet, snow, and strong northwest winds
followed closely on the heels of the tornado creating near-blizzard
conditions, the temperature falling to zero by midnight.
The storm first caused extensive hail damage in and around Brodhead,
breaking thousands of windows. The tornado touched down east of
Brodhead, near Orfordville, where four members of one family were
killed. The newspapers of the day often included graphic descriptions:
The tornado continued
northeastward through the countryside
cutting a wide path across the north side of Janesville and onward
to Milton where it demolished a recently built schoolhouse--one of
many schools destroyed by the storm. In this respect, it was fortunate
that it was Saturday, the schools empty, or the death toll would have
surely been much higher. Along its course, the tornado destroyed
farmhouses, barns, and outbuildings, leaving many families homeless.
The heavy rains, sleet, and snow which followed turned the roads--which
were already choked with debris--into impassable quagmires. Many of
the homeless were forced to spend the night in barns, outbuildings, or
in open fields.
Rescuers had a nearly impossible task in reaching the stricken area.
The storm blew hay, cornstalks, and other debris into huge piles which
resembled hastily constructed entrenchments. The roads were also filled
with tangles of barbed wire, telephone poles and lines, and tree branches.
Along the roadsides lay countless bodies of cattle, horses, hogs, chickens,
and dogs killed in the storm and frozen solid by the bitter cold winds that
followed. Cattle which survived wandered about freely, the fences having
been blown down. On the Schmitt farm, a hog was literally nailed to tree
with a plowshare. There were numerous reports of chickens which were
plucked or "deprived" of their feathers which subsequently froze to death.
Weather map for the evening of the
11th:
Note the absence of warm and cold fronts--frontal theories were not
developed until World War II. This hand sketched map appeared in the
Janesville Gazette. An another article on the same day stated that sunspots
were the solar equivalent of storms here on earth and were considered to be
the cause of all the weather on earth.
Final statistics: 9 killed, 50 injured. Tornado path length: 18 miles,
width: 400 yards. Damage exceeded $500,000.
“Tornadoes of Wisconsin.” 10 October 2004. Available online:
http://www.wx-fx.com/tornado.htm
Group 4
The Lone Rock Tornado May 21st 1918
In the May 23, 1918 edition of the Home News the onset of the storm was
reported as follows: "The black funnel which pounced upon Lone Rock seemed
to jump from the bluffs south of town, and consumed at most but five minutes in
its work of death and destruction."
The storm swept across Lone Rock from the southwest to the northeast in a
path about 100 yards wide, raising and lowering, completely obliterating some
structures, damaging others to varying degrees, and leaving some untouched.
Three people died in Lone Rock: P.C. Pitkin, the 41-year-old editor of the
Tri-County Review, and a young brother and sister, Clara and Donald Hattery.
Clara was 14 years old and Donald was seven when their lives were swept away
by the storm. Pitkin, who was also a practicing lawyer, was standing on the
street
when the storm approached. He took refuge in the hallway of the Union Block
building where his offices were. The lower story of the building collapsed and
the
upper story came down on top of it, crushing Pitkin beneath tons of debris. It
took
volunteers more that three hours of searching before his body was recovered.
Pitkin left behind a wife and two children. Two other men in the Union Block
building narrowly escaped serious injury. Frank Core, who was working at a
typewriter, flung himself beside a desk as the building collapsed. He said he
felt
the floor moving in waves--the only warning he had of the tornado. Floyd Wells
was in the Core and Wells hardware store. A steel bull pen set up for
demonstration kept the wreckage from crushing him when the building collapsed.
Rescuers had to tunnel in from the basement to free him from the debris.
The Union Block building
The Hattery children were killed instantly when their home was picked up and
dashed against the Max Gundlach residence, destroying both houses. Max (Bud)
Gundlach Jr. was six months old at the time of the storm. family's Young Max and
his mother were found in a garden near the home. She had been holding her
youngest child in her arms when the storm blew the house apart. When she was
found by rescuers, she told them to look for the baby. He was found in the
garden,
half-buried under dirt and debris.
"We were fortunate we didn't get hurt more seriously," Gundlach said. He
recalls that his mother had nails imbedded in her flesh by the storm. Some took
years to work their way to the skin surface where they could be removed.
As with any tornado, there were strange quirks of fate: James Pine, his
wife,
and six small children were at home when the tornado struck. The house was
blown down and destroyed yet none of the family received any injuries. They
were all found buried in masses of plaster and wood protected by heavy pieces
of furniture. Isaac Higgins, ran the furniture store and restaurant north of
the train depot. Believing that the storm was heading directly towards him, he
ran from his building into the path of the tornado where he was caught in a
thicket
of flying timbers by the bank building. He received severe injuries while his
building was left unharmed.
Leota Ramlow was 11 years old when the cyclone occurred and was getting
ready to move to Michigan with her family. She took refuge in a commercial
building that was spared by the storm. "We were terribly scared. It came and
went so fast," she said. Ramlow recalled seeing a cow flying through the air as
it was carried aloft by the storm from a pasture west of the village.
In Lone Rock 20 commercial and residential buildings were destroyed,
another score were badly damaged, and many others had some degree of damage.
Across the street from the Union Block, Moore & Sons Meat Market, the
Masonic Hall, Galen Moore's corner building and the village's telephone
exchange were all reduced to rubble. The manager of the Bell Telephone
exchange, Frank Straub, kept the exchange open by hanging his instruments
in trees and the remaining telephone poles.
The greatest loss of merchandise occurred at J. M. Brophy's store and
warehouse. The store lost its front and roof, and the warehouse, a two-story, 30
foot by 60 foot, cement block building, was leveled. Other buildings completely
destroyed included: the electric light plant (though the equipment remained
intact), Brainard & Son's store, the homes of Mrs. William Stocks, Max
Gundlach, Mrs. Hattery, Bert Fries, Mrs. Joseph Hodgson, Henry Axelmaker,
Fred Schiouch, John Culver, George Finch, James Pine and Mrs. Crary, along
with several barns and sheds.
Buildings sustaining heavy damage included: Cunningham's drug store, the old
Post Office, J. F. Beardsley's implement warehouse, Walter Greenheck's livery,
the new Post Office, the ten-cent store, and the Johnson Meat Market.
The storm also upended nine rail freight cars, seven of them heavy
refrigerator
cars. A few were simply blown over. Others rolled over several times. One was
picked up and carried 150 feet over a barn and came to rest against a row of
trees.
The twister drove a timber through the brick front of a main street building:
With darkness and pouring rain following the tornado, rescue work was slow
medical attention difficult to give according to Dr George Jamieson, who was
assisted by Drs Eagan and Reynolds. The first report the neighboring community
of Spring Green heard of the disaster was when a telephone call was made
requesting physicians and a priest. Doctors were followed by others who assisted
in searching for victims among the ruins.
The estimated damage loss in Lone Rock was $200,000, equivalent to millions
of dollars today.
As the cyclone continued its way northeast, it caused great damage to
buildings
and livestock on the farms in the West Spring Green prairie area and lower Big
Hollow. Norman Dyke lost his home and all other buildings along with two horses,
a colt, all his household goods, feed and machinery. Harry Peck, on the old T.
C.
Peck homestead, lost the dwelling and all buildings, four cows, 30 hogs, 150
chickens, all household goods, feed and machinery. The storm took the roof off
Frank Blynn's barn and destroyed his silo. David Creasy and S.T. Peck lost all
buildings except their dwellings. The house on Mrs. Amos Mercer's farm,
occupied by the Daniel Tennant family, was destroyed. All of the Tennants
received minor injuries. Because the storm took down the rural telephone lines,
word of the destruction on the prairie and in Plain did not reach Spring Green
until the morning after the storm.
At Plain the storm destroyed the St. Luke's Catholic Church building and
it's
new parsonage. Rev. George Pesch, who was hurled from the parsonage as it
was leveled by the storm, ignored his own injuries, which were thought to be
minor, to come to the aid of his parishioners. Two weeks later he died after
suffering a stroke. The other death near Plain was a four-year-old boy, John
Beck, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Alois Beck. The Beck home had been blown off
its foundation, and the boy was found beneath the ruins. His brother Andrew was
severely injured.
The church was completely leveled except for the steeple. The property
loss
was estimated at more than $l00,000. St Lukes school suffered light damage,
and the roof was lifted off the Sister's House and then set back down in place
by the wind. Monuments in the church cemetery were also heavily damaged.
Joseph Ruhland's building housing his sawmill was also blown down as was
the power house. Anna Roulette's restaurant in the Inenfeldt building was
heavily damaged. The plate glass windows on the front of the Plain State Bank
were blown apart. The roof was removed from William Reuschlein's store and
every window smashed. The Beck & Nachreiner store was also damaged.
Numerous barns and houses in the village were destroyed.
The cyclone then hit the Milton Yanke home in Irish Valley, tearing off
the
upper story and wrecking the summer kitchen. Yanke had tried and failed to
hold the door of summer kitchen shut. He was sucked out of the building. His
body was found later, pinned underneath an uprooted tree in his yard. The
storm continued its path of destruction through the Leland area. Damage from
the same weather system was also reported in the Bear Valley and Poynette
areas.
All along its path, the storm track was defined by bits of household
effects,
building materials, dead poultry, horses, and cattle, and debris of all kinds.
In the aftermath of the storm, neighbors and family members helped rebuild
damaged buildings, cared for the injured, buried the dead and consoled those
who lost loved ones. Clean-up crews of volunteers from neighboring towns
helped with the enormous task of clearing debris from streets and farm fields
so commerce and agriculture could resume.
Final Statistics: 8 killed, 100 injured. Tornado path length: 80 miles
(likely a
family of tornadoes. Path width: 400 yards. Damages: $650,000. Rated F4
by the Tornado Project.
Photos courtesy of the Lone Rock Community Library.
“Tornadoes of Wisconsin.” 10 October 2004. Available online:
http://www.wx-fx.com/tornado.htm
According to available
information, six tornadoes ripped across northern
Wisconsin on September 21st, 1924. Surveys
were seldom carried out in the
aftermath of storms then and the surveys that were done were primitive,
reflecting the lack of knowledge about severe storms and tornado formation
in that era. Several of the singles tornadoes listed were probably families of
tornadoes spawned by the same storm so that the actual number of tornadoes
that occurred that day may be double or even triple the official count.
Regardless,
in a little over three hours, 34 people lost their lives, 115 people were
injured,
and property losses totaled one million dollars even most of the damage
occurred in rural areas.
(All ratings and statistics courtesy of the Tornado Project. A map of the
tornado
outbreak follows the narratives.)
The first tornado touched down three miles southeast of Rice Lake and
traveled
northeast for 8 miles to near Campia. One person was killed outright and a
second
may have died later from injuries.
Rated F3. 1 killed, 15 injured. Path length 8 miles, path width 300 yards.
The second tornado touched down two miles north of Chetek where barns and
several hundred trees were destroyed. The tornado (possibly one of several, this
may have been the first family of tornadoes) moved north-northeast for 40 miles,
causing little serious damage until seven miles southwest of Couderay where two
two children were killed when their home was destroyed.
Rated F2. 2 killed, 10 injured. Path length 40 miles, path width 300 yards.
The third tornado was almost certainly a family of tornadoes given the long
track
of 65 miles and the lack of alignment of damage along a single path in Clark
County.
The first funnel touched down two miles southeast of Augusta in Eau Claire
County,
and moved northeast through Clark County to 2 miles north of Chelsea in Taylor
County. Near Rib Lake, 20 farms were destroyed and another thirty were heavily
damaged.
Personal accounts from the Eau Claire Leader:
(Many of the newspaper accounts are confusing and contradictory, listing
people
in both the injured and dead columns, and often listing the same person twice
with
a slightly altered last name. As a result, the initial fatality counts were
greatly
exaggerated...59 according to one report)
The tornado struck first at the Chester Poor farm south of Thorpe,
demolishing barns
and scattering household goods and furniture about the yard. Up the road, John
Frese
and Ervin Biddle escaped without injury when the barn they were standing in was
lifted
and blown away right over their heads. Clinging to a tree, Richard Biddle, a
Thorp
farmer, watched the destruction of his neighbor's property. When Mrs Biddle saw
her
husband outside, she ran to the door and screamed, "My God, Pa! Come inside!
You're
going to be killed!" Just then, a steel windmill near Biddle toppled over and a
flying
timber struck a glancing blow, knocking him unconscious. Risking her own life,
Mrs
Biddle ran out into the storm and dragged her husband to safety. Other than a
gash to
the head, he was not seriously injured. All the buildings on their farm except
for the
house were destroyed. Mrs Biddle also said she saw a man, high in the air, pass
over
their house, carried along by the wind.
(The accounts are somewhat confused at this point, talking of a second
tornado
or an abrupt change of course for the first tornado. Most likely, it was the
second
tornado in this family, hence these differing accounts)
In the meantime, some residents of the place believe a second tornado hit
Withee.
In addition to taking a large toll of life, it ripped the great steel railroad
bridge across
the Black River from its piers. A small boy was standing on the bridge at the
time,
fishing. Every shred of clothing was torn from his body but he was uninjured. He
ran
home in this nude condition to the home of his parents where he told them that
"the
big bridge just went out out with me on it."
After it left the Biddle farm, the path of the twister changed and struck the
John
Graikowski farm. The family had just stepped onto the porch when the winds
caused
it to collapse upon them. Fifteen year-old Rose was killed instantly, the
mother, father
and two boys all seriously injured. Nothing was left standing here, not even the
trees
in the large groves that surrounded the house. Across the road, the tornado
plucked
Tom Hadler from the bed in which he was sleeping and hurled him against a water
tank. Though his house was demolished, Tom suffered only a broken wrist.
Three-year-old Margaret Schmittfranz was killed when the car she was riding
in
was picked and carried 300 feet by the tornado. Margaret and her parents were on
their way home in Thorpe when they noticed the approaching storm. Mr
Schmittfranz
had just stopped the car and stepped out when the wind swept it away (he was
not
injured and there was no explanation how he avoided being swept away by the
winds).
Anton Larzinski, aged 9, was blown from the pasture where he was herding
cattle
and was found unconscious in a swamp about a mile away. Piles of debris from
buildings
had been blown past him and strewn all about the place where he was found. His
only
injury was a bad cut on the back of his head and a fracture to his skull
(despite this
innocuous description of injuries, Anton was listed among the dead). His family,
father,
mother, and seven children took refuge in the basement when the storm approached
but could not reach the boy in the pasture.
Rated F4. 18 killed, 50 injured. Path length 65 miles, path width 400 yards.
The fourth tornado struck in Bayfield County
at 3:45 pm and moved northeast from
near Lake Namekegon to the east of Sanborn.
The newspaper account of this event:
"The storm, similar to one which hit the Marengo valley 25 years ago (I
could find
no account of this previous storm) struck Sanborn about 4:30 pm Sunday,
destroying
everything in a 300 foot strip. Starting at the Frank Milanowsky place, six
miles
southeast of here, the twister destroyed the barn and then jumped half a mile to
the Jake Makis farm, where haystacks were scattered and the barn demolished.
From
there it jumped to the Joseph Shefchik farm where another barn was wrecked. It
took
the roof off the Richard Oliphant home, battered in part of the walls, and
injured
Mildred Taylor, a 13 year-old neighbor girl.
The John Hill place, in which Hill, his wife, a nephew, Victor Flander, and
Jacob
Solma, a visitor, were killed outright was visited next. The house was crushed
by the
wind, catching the occupants beneath the wreckage. Mrs Solma, the only one to
escape alive , is at the Ashland General Hospital with a crushed chest.
For two miles the cyclone traveled after leaving the Hill place, without
doing any
damage. Then it hit the John Matison home. The whole family were in the house
when the wind struck it, first blowing out all the windows. Then, according to
Matison, the whole house seemed to go. Wreckage from the house was scattered
for half a mile and members of the family were thrown various distances, a
seven year-old daughter Elsie receiving injuries to which she succumbed after
being brought to the Ashland Hospital."
Rated F4. 7 killed, 20 injured. Path length 25 miles, path width 200 yards.
The fifth tornado was brief, unroofing a hotel and destroying a barn in
Oneida
County.
Rated F2. No injuries. Path length 2 miles.
The sixth "official" tornado of the day touched down five miles south of
Tomahawk
and moved northeast to Three Lakes 35 miles away. This too was probably a family
of tornadoes. Five deaths occurred in Oneida
County, three in one family in a home
five miles west of Starks. A child was killed while running for shelter south of
Tomahawk.
Rated F3. 6 killed, 20 injured. Path length 35 miles, path width 200 yards.
Map of the 1924 outbreak in Northern
Wisconsin:
“Tornadoes of Wisconsin.” 10 October 2004. Available online:
http://www.wx-fx.com/tornado.htm
"I felt a sudden pressure in my
ears and before I knew it, cement
blocks, machines, and people were floating around on the ceiling!"
This was the recollection of John Sands, president of Sands Knitting
Mills, after a tornado ripped through the mill on
April 11, 1956. Thirty
five women and fifteen men were in the three-year-old plant when it was
heavily damaged by the storm. A large portion of the building caved in,
trapping the employees inside, though miraculously, nobody within the
plant was seriously injured. Several of the employees returned to the
mill the following day to assist with clean up. Mr.Seelinger, a cutting
machine operator, found a board which was carried into the mill by the
storm:
"What else CAN you save in a storm like that?" he said.
The tornado struck the southeast sector of Berlin at approximately 1:40pm
after damaging at least three farms south and west of the city. It came within
a few yards of the high school where four hundred students were in class.
The terrified students watched the tornado churn towards the high school,
but the funnel veered to the right, barely missing the school. Witnesses
saw cars and buildings lifted and carried through the air.
Mrs. Neil Zamzow had been home doing housework that day when
she chanced to look out her window and saw a funnel-shaped object
heading towards her house. As soon as she realized it was a tornado,
she ran outside to grab her four year old daughter who was playing
in the yard. As she turned back toward the house, she watched the
tornado strike the main building of the Carnation plant. Mrs. Zamzow
ran to her basement, shoved her daughter between a large freezer and
several bags of cement, and laid on top of her. Soon afterwards, she
heard a loud crash. She looked up in time to see the framework of her
house uprooted from the foundation and carried away. Then all she saw
was daylight--the house had been flattened to kindling. Mrs. Zamzow
suffered some scratches but her daughter was unhurt. Not all were so
lucky. One woman and her children, were literally pulled out of the mud
and taken to the hospital by a volunteer. The woman--who was badly
injured--told the driver that her 6 year old daughter was still missing.
She had been in the upstairs of the house when the tornado hit. The
little girl's body was later found in the wreckage of the house.
An Appleton salesman who was installing a milk cooler on a farm
near Berlin said he saw one funnel form. He said the most terrifying
thing about the whole ordeal was the noise. For about fifteen minutes
before the funnel appeared, there was a continuous roar, which sounded
like a squadron of jets. At the Lloyd farm, the interior of the ten-room
home was turned into a shambles with no room spared. Their barn lost
the roof, scattering timber and roofing over the fields and the main level
of the big cattle barn was destroyed. Forty head of cattle which were in
the barn stalls when the tornado hit survived unscathed. Yet another
eyewitness saw a flock of geese being sucked in by the tornado and
then whirled around like confetti.
Hughes Auto Sales was directly in the path of the tornado. After
demolishing four homes across the street, it plowed through the used
car lot, garage, and three adjoining buildings. Seven cars on the lot
were picked up and thrown as far as fifty yards. The remaining cars
were picked up and tossed on top of each other. Hughes Auto was a
complete loss.
Martial Law was ordered in Berlin shortly after the storm. National
guardsmen helped maintain communications among emergency
workers in the Berlin disaster zone by setting up portable radios.
Berlin received help from many surrounding communities in the slow
process of rebuilding their lives.
Final statistics: 7 killed, 50 injured. Tornado path length: 12 miles;
width: 400 yards. Damage over $1,000,000. Rated F4 by the Tornado
Project.
“Tornadoes of Wisconsin.” 10 October 2004. Available online:
http://www.wx-fx.com/tornado.htm
While remembered as the Colfax
tornado, the massive tornado which struck on June
4th, 1958 caused extensive damage across all
of Dunn County in northwest Wisconsin.
That evening, weather conditions produced intense supercells which produced four
tornadoes over a 120 mile path from St Croix
county to Marathon county. At least
three of these tornadoes caused F4 damage (based on research by the Tornado
Project
since the Fujita scale had yet to be invented) and at times were half-a-mile
wide,
monsters by Wisconsin standards. The first
tornado touched down at 6:30CST
southwest of Woodville in St Croix County.
Moving east at an average of 52mph,
the tornado killed Art Peterson, a farmer, on the St Croix line, crossed into
Dunn
County and destroyed a construction crew trailer camp (working on the future
I-94)
killing Ruth Rusch, the wife of a worker and injuring twelve others. Just east
of
there, the tornado destroyed several farms and claimed another life. Crossing
CTH
K, Roy and Margaret Larson and son Earl were killed when a silo toppled upon
them
as they rushed from the barn to the house. The tornado grazed the north side of
Menomonie, flattening barns and farmhouses, before plowing through the
village of
Cedar Falls, leaving only three buildings
standing. The twister then turned to the
northeast into its most destructive phase, leveling farms,
outbuildings--everything
in its path. The tornado struck Colfax at
7:07pm, entering the village along STH 40,
missing most of Main Street except at the
southern end, laying waste to the southeast
section of the village. In Colfax, the tornado destroyed 60 buildings, killed 12
people,
and injured many more. The tornado continued in a northeasterly direction,
demolishing
12 farmhouses in a one-and-a-half mile stretch along the town road before
lifting five
miles out of Colfax. The twister was originally reported as continuing through
Chippewa
and Clark counties but it was later determined these were separate tornadic
events
which are listed briefly at the end of this page.
Dr Gordon Neumann, a dentist, rode out the storm in his office and provided a
graphic account of what he saw: "At first I thought it was going to be just a
real
heavy storm. Then I saw the trees weren't just bending, they were horizontal.
Then
the trees--big ones mind you, not saplings, snapped like matchsticks. Several
large
houses shot through the air like dolls' houses and landed two blocks from their
foundations. I never forget what it sounded like; it was like blasting in a
quarry.
Then came the rain and the hail. As soon as the tornado had passed, I grabbed my
first aid kit and joined two doctors--an MD and a veterinarian--helping the
injured.
I saw a man lying in the street with a plank driven through his chest. He was
dead.
I ran towards two other persons. They were dead also. I ran from house to house.
People huddled in their basements. Adults cried, children screamed. A number of
persons were incoherent and in a stage of shock. It was so sudden...it was so
awful."
Donna Stalson, her husband Juel, and Earling Braaten were on their way to Eau
Claire for dinner. Her memories of that evening: "The weather was warm, the air
was heavy. Radios blared static and rain fell intermittently. Juel was driving
our
beautiful 1956 Oldsmobile. Rain was falling as we approached Colfax from the
east on Highway 40. The wind increased and to our right, a huge tree eased to
the
ground and the roots popped out. Then the wind was coming from everywhere and
it was dark, the darkest dark I have ever seen. Juel turned into a driveway and
turned around, heading east. Moments before, we might have escaped but we didn't
know we were inside the funnel cloud of a tornado. By this time, the wind was
wild
and Juel was pushing hard on the brake pedal. The car was rocking and things
were
flying through the air. It was a good time to be on speaking terms with the
Almighty.
We were all praying as the rear of the car lifted and began to roll end over
end.
"When I regained consciousness, I was in a ditch on the south side of the
road. Shoes
and glasses were gone and there was sand in my eyes. An eerie yellow light
prevailed.
The stench of sulfur was sickening. The twisted and scarred landscape looked
like
the edge of hell. Juel came walking toward me from the north side of the road.
He was
holding a broken arm and his face was a mass of cuts. He looked like a walking
road
map and was later photographed for a Red Cross poster. Erling came from a field
on
the south. He had been rolled over and over in mid-air. His shirt was gone. We
must
have looked like visitors from another planet. Dirt in buckshot amounts was
packed
on my face and my hair stood straight on end. The car had been taken 400 yard.
There
was hardly enough left for junk. The devastation was mind boggling. Like
sleepwalkers
we stepped over power lines and debris in a world we had never seen before.
Someone
in a car stopped and took us as near as possible to the home of relatives. They
didn't
recognize us. Later, when chain saws had cleared the way, we were taken to
hospitals.
Erling had broken ribs, Juel just a broken arm and cuts and I had lacerations
and
abrasions. It was a day to remember."
It was the thirteenth inning of a tied baseball game between the Los Angeles
Dodgers and the Milwaukee Braves and Milwaukee was at bat with the bases
loaded. Louis Christenson was captivated by the game as he watched the TV
on the evening of June 4th, 1958. A little too captivated perhaps because Louis
did not heed the warnings of approaching bad weather. There were plenty of signs
of it--the sky had grown very dark and there was lightning and thunder. When he
finally noticed the dark sky, he said he thought is was another dust storm, not
a
tornado. "The sky looked dark like there was sand in it, just like dirt
blowing,"
he said.
When the tornado struck his northern Colfax house, Louis did not have time to
run for the basement, which was outside his house anyway. Knowing it was too
late,
he hurried his wife, daughter, and nephew into a corner of his living room and
flung
himself on top to hold them down. When the tornado struck, the wind was terrific
and
noisy like a freight train, he recalled. While the tornado could not have been
long
at their house, it seemed like hours to the huddled family. Part of the roof
went and
the house was pretty well racked up, everything all over. Miraculously, none of
them
were hurt. Looking around outside the house, he found that his garage, with his
dog
inside had blown away. The dog returned three days later. His car which had been
parked outside, had a six-by-six post driven through it. Taking a further look
around,
he saw bodies, one "definitely dead" laying on the road nearby and the Bethany
Lutheran Brethren Church flattened. "Wherever I looked, everyone was wondering
around in a daze."
Although Edith Haase thought it was very hot for a June day, she decided to
bake
bread in her wood stove because she was expecting company. There was not much
warning before the storm struck, she remembered. She and her visitors had been
admiring her garden when they noticed the sky looked dark and that a storm was
racing over the hills. Worried that rain was approaching, her friends left to
avoid
driving in bad weather. When Edith and her family realized a bad storm was
approaching Colfax, the hurried down the basement, but Edith the remembered
she had forgotten a blanket for the baby so she rushed upstairs to grab one. It
was
a near fatal move. As she stepped down to the basement, the tornado struck,
twisting
the house on the foundation, sweeping the chimney and porch away, and destroying
the garage behind the house. She escaped without injury and despite the damage
to her house was just happy to be alive.
The storm produced an assortment of bizarre twists typical to large violent
tornadoes.
Straws were driven into trees that were impossible to pull out and trees were
found
with the bark rolled off from the top down to the bases. At the Martin Olson
home,
part of the kitchen and one bedroom remained. When he moved the mattress from
the
bed, he found a pair of men's pants that did not belong to him as well a large
work boot
underneath the bed. Harold Laustad's Social Security card was found 80 miles
away,
far to the north in Sheldon. After vacationing in the area for the previous four
summers,
the Carl Hughes family from California decided to move to the Colfax area
shortly
before June 4th. Before they made a final decision to leave California, they
asked
whether Colfax was a tornado area. Reassured it was not, they settled down on a
local
farm. "Well sir," Hughes said, "we made it just in time to get in on the
granddaddy of
all tornadoes." And little did Jean Mittlesdorf know when she checked out "Gone
with the Wind" from the local library that the book would soon be just that.
Looking
on the bright side of this disaster, the tornado actually did Carl Nelson a
favor, tearing
his front porch off of his house. "My wife and I had been talking about tearing
off that
porch for quite awhile," he said. "Now it's done for us. We didn't exactly
figure to git
it off that way but anyhow, we are rid of it and that's something."
The following, by Leo Nelson, appeared in the July, 1958 Wisconsin REA News:
While walking dow the Dunn county driveway last week, I found a Chinese
postage
stamp and was not surprised. This was normal; this was the stamp of the mad
wind.
There was other evidence in the fields nearby. Linoleum fragments in thirteen
different patterns and more than twenty varieties of wallpaper. A lamp shade and
a
chair seat, a Norwegian postcard, a French bank note and a hot dish pad.
This was the perimeter of the tornado, the area of lightweight fallout.
Letters,
canceled checks and receipts. Pictures torn from albums as the Chinese stamp had
been torn from a collector's album in Colfax, four miles to the west.
There was a bizarre orderliness to this thing, a weird and personal
orderliness.
The debris listed here was all found on one farm where my grandmother once
lived. Among the 28 pictures found, there was an old picture she'd taken with
her
when she moved to Colfax. The picture had been left in the attic of her Colfax
house
after her death, and the tornado smashed that house, took the picture and
brought
it back to the farm. And just to prove its neat intentions, the storm put down
near
that picture a letter and canceled check belonging to Frank Langel, who lived
next
door to the house from which the picture came.
These evidences of destruction came down where the storm left no other
tracks.
The lush green of the month of June was the same as other years. Yet less than a
mile away, just over the hill, was a scar that will take years to heal. That the
scar
was caused by moving air is beyond comprehension. This is the same air that you
wish would move on a hot summer night. It's the same air that musses up your
hair
and rustles leaves during a pleasant day. A different set of conditions can move
it
with the force of a bomb blast and bend steel flagpoles and bridges, peel the
bark off
trees and asphalt off the highway.
It was a beautiful day, that day after the storm. There wasn't a cloud in the
sky. The
sun ws bright enough so you could see things like Chinese postage stamps and
French bank notes. Other things were even easier to see. A truckload of dead
cows
heading for the rendering plant...a herd of live cows stampeding back and forth
as
airplanes bearing sightseers roared overhead...the tired faces of the co-op
linemen
who had worked all night and would continue most of the next night and the night
after
that...the National Guardsmen stationed at avery road leading to
Colfax...sightseers
lost while looking for unguarded back roads.
The most memorable sight of all was the home farm. It was still there, missed
by a
half a mile. After a wild 200 mile drive during which one grim newscast after
another
poured out over the radio, it was truly a beautiful sight. Another memorable
sight was
the rainbow. It was there in the sky over the torn countryside the fourth day
after
the storm. If you stood at the right place, you could see, at the foot of the
rainbow,
two columns of smoke. The smoke came from the fires that farmers built to burn
the
heaps of rubble remaining from their houses and barns.
The June issue of the Wisconsin REA News was being distributed the day of the
storm. In this column of that edition were these words: If you hear a train
going
past your house and there aren't any tracks there, head for the cellar.
Final statistics:
Tornado #1 (Dunn County/Colfax): 20 killed, 110 injured. Tornado path length:
32 miles, path width 800yds. Damage in the millions. Rated F4 by the Tornado
Project. Rated F5 by the National Weather Service.
Tornado #2 (Near Chippewa Falls): 4 killed, 56 injured. Tornado path length:
5 miles, path width 300yds. Rated F4 by the Tornado Project. This tornado moved
ENE from 5 miles west of Chippewa Falls, moving across the north edge of town
and ending 6 miles northeast of town. The deaths were in Chippewa Falls but the
F4 damage was to farms northeast of town.
Tornado #3 (Chippewa County): 3 injured. Tornado path length 5 miles, path
width
200yds. Rated F3 (possibly F4) by the Tornado Project. This tornado moved ENE,
destroying at least one home 1 mile west of Cadott. Little attention was paid to
this
event with so much damage elsewhere.
Tornado #4 (Chippewa/Clark Counties): 4 killed, 3 injured. Tornado path
length:
27 miles, path width 800yds. Rated F4 by the Tornado Project. This tornado moved
east from southeast of Cadott, passinf 2 miles south of Boyd, south of Stanley,
and
south of Owen to near Curtiss. Deaths occurred in farm houses south of Boyd and
Stanley.
“Tornadoes of Wisconsin.” 10 October 2004. Available online:
http://www.wx-fx.com/tornado.htm
Group 8
The Oshkosh Tornado April 21st, 1974
After herding the rest of his
family into the basement to
escape an oncoming tornado, Gordon Hagstrom realized that his
little girl, Stephanie, was missing. He searched and found the 4
year old in the bathroom. But as he went to grab her, the tornado
swept the roof off their house and she was sucked up toward the
violent twister.
"I lunged for her as she was
being raised up and I grabbed onto the
sink to keep from being sucked up too," he said. "Then --I don't
know how -- I made my way back downstairs with her."
A few seconds later it was all
over. Their furniture and other
belongings were scattered for blocks. One man whose home was
two doors away from the Hagstrom's recalled being pushed into
and through his own house by the force of the headwind of the
tornado. John Nevers, an Oshkosh West High
School phy-ed
teacher, was cooking over a barbecue pit in his garage when a
hail storm drew him outside in curiosity. When he turned to enter
his house he felt as if "someone was chasing me, pushing me inside."
At that moment the west wall
blew off the house. Mr. Nevers ran
into the dining room, still being propelled by the wind pressure, and
saw his patio deck blow past the window. Then the window crashed
in. John found his wife and her mother huddled in a hallway. He
tried to push them back. As he attempted to do so the living room
fell in right behind him. "I was never so scared in all my life. I
thought this was it"
The pressure of the wind kept
hitting him from behind, shoving
him into his wife, Eileen, and shoving her in turn onto her mother.
The two women fell to the floor from the insistent blows. John
threw himself on top of them to protect them from flying debris.
In another part of the house, the Nevers's daughter, Mary,
headed toward the basement but was forced back upstairs by
flying glass.
"The whole thing lasted about 30
seconds. It was unbelievable,"
Nevers said. "We're lucky to be alive."
Mary was treated for
lacerations. Her mother, who had just
returned from the hospital that morning found herself back at
the hospital with a broken hip, caused by her fall.
Copyright Rusty Kapela All rights reserved
A young man walking on Algoma
Blvd. realized he was in danger
and began pounding on the door of a nearby home. As the door
opened and the stranger pulled him inside, a large tree crashed
across the doorstep where he had just been standing. A woman
sitting in a camper outside a grocery store while her family was
shopping was summoned inside when the storm hit. She joined
other customers and employees on the floor behind the meat
counter. Moments later, the camper she was in was swept into
the air, dropped back down to the ground and demolished.
Calvin Phillips was watching a
basketball game on television
when the tornado hit. "I was sitting in a chair in my living room
when I heard the storm warnings on TV. I looked out of the
back door and I saw the funnel cloud approaching real fast."
Phillips and his wife made it to
the basement just in time. The
basement door left its hinges from the strong winds and hit
Phillips in the leg as he went down the steps. He could see
daylight above the basement floor. As the tornado passed
over the floor was actually jumping. "After it ended we went
upstairs and saw nothing but open sky. I considered myself and
my family lucky to be alive. If I hadn't looked out the back
door we all could have been killed. It's the first time in my
life I ever saw a tornado and I hope it's the last!"
Copyright Rusty Kapela All rights reserved
Questions Remain On Delay of Weather Alert
A spokesman from the U.S.
Weather Bureau in Green Bay was
amazed that more people in Oshkosh were not
injured or killed.
He stated that in other states such as Kansas
and the Great
Plains tornado watches were issued several
hours in advance of an
intense storm cell. But Winnebago County
issued no such watch.
The spokesman could not understand the reason for the failure on
the part of the weather bureau to give out tornado watches. The
time of touchdown was estimated at 3:58 p.m.
The first
notification of the tornado occurred shortly after
4 p.m. The
questions concerning the delay in warning far outnumbered the
answers. An investigation was launched into why the Civil
Defense sirens didn't sound. The answer came that Thursday. The
Oshkosh police officer who was in a position
to push the button
that would have provided the only citywide public warning
deliberately didn't push it. He feared that citizens wouldn't
know how to react. The investigator said that when the sirens
where installed in the 1950's, public concern over the atomic
threat was at its peak, and the devastated areas on the southwest
and north sides were largely undeveloped. He conceded that had
the sirens been sounded, some citizens may have been driven by
curiosity into the streets, where city patrolmen were blaring
warnings over their loudspeakers.
The fact remains, the
investigator said, that the city of Oshkosh
simply had not been educated to the other potential emergency
uses of the sirens. He believed the officer did the right thing,
however he would get to work on an education program and
direct that additional sirens be installed. Despite the failure to
warn the public, nobody in the city of Oshkosh
was killed.
Seventeen people were reported injured. Property damage
reached 4 million dollars. The hardest hit area was the section
on the south by Witzel Avenue and the east
close to Titan
Stadium. Eleven commercial structures were damaged. The
city took on the appearance of an occupied zone as 180 national
guardsmen, county sheriff officers, auxiliary policemen and 88
members of the Oshkosh Police Department patrolled the area
to safeguard property and prevent looting.
Copyright Rusty Kapela All rights reserved
Final statistics: 0 killed, 35
injured. Path length: 25 miles, path
width: 200yds. Rated F4.
“Tornadoes of Wisconsin.” 10 October 2004. Available online:
http://www.wx-fx.com/tornado.htm
Group 9
The Lomira/Brownsville Tornadoes April 21st, 1974
About the time the tornado
thirty miles north in Winnebago County began ripping
through Oshkosh, a series of tornadoes touched
down in Dodge County. They left in
their wake a trail of broken homes and barns, and destroyed a large lumber yard.
Two
deaths and numerous injuries were attributed to the storms. Though these
tornadoes
were not especially violent, they were noteworthy in two respects. Both were
multiple
vortex tornadoes--that is, instead of having one solid condensation funnel, the
way
most people image tornadoes to be, each had several funnels or vortices rotating
around a common center. Multiple vortex tornadoes are often mistakenly reported
as a series of separate tornadoes when they are simply part of a bigger single
rotating
column of wind and are therefore considered to be a single tornado. In addition,
the
Lomira tornado was rotating the "wrong" way. Almost all tornadoes rotate
counter-
clockwise (as viewed from the top) reflecting the winds aloft in the parent
thunderstorm.
The Lomira tornado was rotating clockwise, a rare event indeed. As yet, there is
no
completely satisfactory explanation why some tornadoes rotate clockwise.
The first tornado touched down
north of Burnett at 3:00pm, moved northeast across
the Horicon Marsh, crossing the intersection of Highways 41 & 49 east of
Brownsville
at 3:26pm. There, the tornado plowed through
Club 49, destroying the restaurant.
Customers, alerted at the last moment, just managed to make it into the basemen.
The
tornadoe continued through nearby Kindt Lumber, scattering thousands of
board-feet
of lumber across US Hwy 41. All 9 buildings within the facility were heavily
damaged
and the highway was closed for several hours until snowplows were able to clear
the
debris. With typical overstatement, the local newspapers claimed all buildings
at Kindt
were destroyed when nearby captioned photos showed F2 to minimal F3 damage. The
tornado lifted a short while later southeast of
Eden. This tornado is shown below in a
rare photograph:
Photo courtesy of Don Sampson (c) all rights reserved
The second tornado touched down
near Burnett around 3:30pm but had been first sighted
as a funnel cloud a little west of Columbus at
3:00pm. This tornado moved parallel to the
earlier storm, across the Horicon Marsh, and through the
village of Lomira, crossing Hwy
41 at 3:50pm. Within the village, several
houses, garages, a church steeple, and the American
Legion building were damaged.
The first damage was reported
south of Burnett at the Buege farm destroying several
outbuildings. The same farm had suffered minor damage a year earlier when a
small tornado
followed a very similar path.
Just outside of Lomira, the Ray
Hilt farm was hit first. The family had been celebrating son
Ronnie's First Communion when the sirens were sounded. They managed to get to
the
basement only to discover that their daughter was missing. After the storm
passed she was
found hiding under a bed in an upstairs bedroom. The brick house had lost its
roof and had
shifted so doors which were closed could not be opened, and open doors could not
be closed.
A cement stave silo had been reduced to rubble.
The tornado demolished a barn
across the road and carried debris across the adjoining car
lot. Moving northeast, it scrambled machinery at Schraufnagel Implement, ripped
half of the
roof from the American Legion clubhouse, tossing the debris under the Hwy 67
overpass.
The tornado then caused extensive house and garage damage on South Water and
Grove
streets.
Few people were luckier than
Martin Enderle that afternoon. Martin had been in a camper
parked at the east end of the home, when he heard the tornado siren. As he ran
into the
house, he and his wife saw trees flying over the house. They dashed into the
basement and
moments later, the whole thing was over. The camper that Martin had been in was
blown
on its side and had been heavily damaged. Their home had been lifted off its
foundation,
flipped over, and set on its roof with the front door facing the backyard. The
stairs which
he and his wife had just run down were now jutting up crazily toward the sky.
Luckily,
neither of them were hurt. Afterwards, Mrs Enderle said, "God was with us. If we
hadn't
gotten to the basement when we did, neither of us would be here."
Bob Zimmerman's dog may have
been the luckiest canine. Bob's dog and doghouse
disappeared during the storm. The dog was later found wandering near Hwy 67. He
was
frightened but had nary a scratch on him. The doghouse was found several hundred
away.
Mrs. Eunice Scheberl and the
family were in the basement when the first tornado passed
north of Lomira. Thinking all was clear, she walked back up to her kitchen. She
heard
what she thought was a train. As she looked out her kitchen window, she realized
in
horror that what she heard was not a train but another tornado heading right for
them.
Their lives were saved as the tornado lifted at this point, not damaging the
house at all.
This tornado, or a series of
tornadoes spawned by this one storm, moved northeast
across Fond du Lac county, killing a woman
near Campbellsport when she was
thrown from her mobile home. The storms moved into
Sheboygan county, killing an
infant and causing extensive damage in Howard's Grove.
Final statistics: 2 killed, 18
injured. Tornado path length: first tornado 28 miles,
second tornado 58 miles (probably a family of tornadoes produced by one
supercell),
maximum path width 200yds. Damage for both tornadoes exceeded $2,000,000.
“Tornadoes of Wisconsin.” 10 October 2004. Available online:
http://www.wx-fx.com/tornado.htm
Myths about tornadoes abound:
violent tornadoes do not occur at night or that
various geographical features--lakes, hills, ridges--protect a town from the
deadly
winds of a tornado. Those two myths were literally smashed in the early hours of
June 8th, 1984. Barneveld sits on the western
flank of Blue Mound, the highest
point in southwestern Wisconsin--local legend
long held that the town would always
be protected from violent storms by the mound. The legend said storms would be
pushed one side or the other of the mound, or broken in two by it. Mocking the
folly of the legends, the storm rolled right over Blue Mound in the dead of
night.
The afternoon and evening of
June 7th, 1984, was stormy and deadly long before
night fell and the winds came slashing across southwestern
Wisconsin. At least 36
tornadoes touched down in Kansas, Missouri,
Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin,
killing four people, injuring 115 others, and causing millions of dollars in
damage.
One storm in particular cut a long swath of damage across southern and eastern
Iowa dropping at least four tornadoes through
10pm that evening. It moved north
east across Iowa, quiescent for a time before
intensifying again in the dark skies
of southwestern Wisconsin. A tornado watch was
issued but many people had gone
to bed and were unaware of it. At 12:30am (CDT, the LSR times are listed in
CST),
the storm produced a tornado which cut an 11 mile path of minor damage (later
rated F2) from north of Belmont to Mineral
Point. At 12:41, a second tornado
touched down south of Ridgeway, quickly intensified and plowed through the
heart of Barneveld. The only warning was an intense blast of thunder which
shook many of the residents from their beds....
Cindy Schaller had been awakened by the beep from a smoke alarm: "Then there
was the most incredible crash of thunder and lightning I have ever heard in my
life.
I can't describe how horrible that noise was--like it was right on top of your
head.
I looked out the window and saw our little birch tree bent over to the ground.
We
were all awake by now--Melanie and Mark were in their bedrooms upstairs, and
Melissa had been downstairs with her boyfriend watching TV. Melanie screamed,
'Tornado!'--and whatever possessed her to know it was a tornado, I don't know, I
guess it was because the house was shaking. You could hear glass breaking too.
Melanie started for the stairs, with Mark right behind her; but he didn't know
that
Melissa was downstairs so he went into her room and tried to find her. My
husband
Bob had stepped into the bathroom to put his slacks on.
Melanie made it downstairs to the kitchen and Mark was in the dining room at
the bottom of the stairs...I was at the top of the stairs, looking at the
landing halfway
down, where there was a little window; the lightning was flashing continuously
so
there was a kind of blue glow. I couldn't go down because the stairway was
swaying
back and forth. There was a pressure, like a huge force pulling at you, just
like it
was going to pull you apart. I can close my eyes and still feel it. "It must be
a
tornado,' I thought, but for a very fleeting instant, I was afraid it was a
nuclear bomb.
I've never felt anything like it and I hope I never do again. Things were flying
through
the air and hitting me, and then I could feel myself falling. At that point
something
very heavy hit me and kind of pushed me, probably part of the roof; the force of
the
blow tore my lower back open, splitting the skin. There is fear and then there
is
terror, and that was terror. 'The next thing that hits me is going to
kill me,' I thought.
I had no doubt in my mind that the next blow I felt was going to be the deadly
blow.
I remember falling and more things hitting me--and then, all of the sudden, it
was
quiet."
Mary Ann Myers was awakened by the thunder: "The first thing I remember after
going to sleep was this tremendous crack of thunder and lightning together--I
looked
at the clock radio, and it was ten minutes to one. At that very moment the power
went
off, and there was no more light in the radio. I had a big bay with four windows
in it,
and right then the windows started to shake. I knew that I must get out of bed
and
get my girls and go to the basement--it was there, it was like right now.
I jumped up
immediately and made a dash for the hallway that led to their room, and when I
opened the door into the hallway, that side of the house had already blown away,
and
all I could see was a tree bending in the wind. I stood there and I screamed and
I
gasped and I prayed to God. There was nothing there. I was at the edge of
nowhere,
just a row of steps going downstairs into the yard. I prayed:'What am I going to
do--my girls--where are they?' I had to get my bearings, so I opened the door to
go
downstairs into the living room, and the door blew shut on my arm. It hurt
because
it had cracked the bone, but it didn't matter to me at that point. I tried again
and got
the door open, came downstairs and stood in the living room. I didn't know what
I was
going to do. I couldn't imagine what life would be like without my family."
Charlie Aschliman recalled the night before the tornado (Thursday night): "I
was
out in the backyard with my wife and the two kids and a friend of ours, trying
to nail
boards around a fence we were building for our little swimming pool. It was
really,
really windy; I picked up an eight foot board and tried to carry it, and the
wind almost
blew it out of my hands.
We went to bed around 11 o'clock. I fell into a dead sleep--I guess the storm
started up a little later because Susan, my wife, had to go get Matthew out of
his
bed. Both of the boys did not like storms; the older one, Michael, would just
get
out of his bed and come in and sleep with us when it stormed, but Matthew was
two
years old and he'd always start crying. So Sue brought him in and put him in our
and then went to the bathroom, and while she was in there, that's when she heard
it
coming.
She came running out of the bathroom, screaming at me to grab Michael and get
to the basement--all I remember is just waking up, I didn't even hear anything.
It
was already hitting town when I got out of bed.
Susan had a hard time finding Matthew because the power was out and he was
on the other side of the bed. I had Michael and we were ahead of her, but we
didn't
know by how much; we had to run all the way through the hall, out through the
living
room by the front door of the house, a good fifty steps--and from there, we had
to go
down into the basement. And as we were running down the basement steps, I could
hear windows shattering and two-by-fours snapping. It was on us. I just kept
running,
carrying Michael. We got to the bottom of the steps and ran into the furnace
room,
I don't know why--you don't have time to think. I braced my elbows against the
cement
wall and held Michael between me and the wall, and you just heard everything
going,
everything behind us was going. I heard all the sheet metal from the furnace
coming
towards us--we were between the furnace and the wall--and I said to myself,
'Well,
this is it.' I was sure it was going to slam the furnace into us, but then
everything
stopped, right before the furnace reached us.
The house was already gone; the chimney that ran from the basement up through
the roof, twenty feet long, had tipped over and had missed Michael and I by
about
two feet.
After it was all over with, I set Michael up over the cement wall, because
the
house was gone and there was no way you could walk out through the basement, it
was just plastered with garbage--I set him up and then I boosted myself out over
the
foundation. We didn't know where Susan and Matthew were. We walked a little
ways and then we heard her screaming"--Matthew had been ripped from her arms
when the house blew away--"Sue screaming that Matthew was hurt. At the time we
didn't know how badly, because there were no lights--we just had our underwear
on, it was raining, and that was the coldest rain you could ever feel in your
life. I
remember how in the lightning we'd look and see that the houses all around us
were
flattened; you know, at first we had thought that maybe it was just our house
that
was hit. Nobody had any idea how bad it was because you couldn't see anything.
Susan kept saying, 'We've got to get Matthew help--he's hurt.
'Let's go down to the fire station," I told her, because it was only a block
or so
away. So we started walking down the street, and every time lightning flashed we
would see another house that was all flattened out. We hollered for people, for
help,
and didn't hear anything from anybody, so we just kept trying to reach the fire
station.
We figured that it was like a fallout shelter--they always say that a brick
building
would be the place to go to for safety, so we just kept on walking down there
and
every house we went by, the lightning would flash and you could see that it was
demolished. No clothes on, no shoes, our feet got pretty well cut up because
there
was so much glass. You know, we didn't know if anyone was alive anymore, and
when
we got down to the fire station...in the lightning, we could see that it was
gone too."
Mary Ann Myers was missing three generations of her family: two daughters
still at home, Jill and Anita; her grandson Joey--Anita's son; and her
mother-in-law
Anne who shared the house with them. The roof of the main part of the house,
where
Mary Anne had been, had blown off and was resting like a ramp against the front
porch. Soon Jill and Anita came walking up the roof toward the front door,
carrying
four-month-old Joey with them; Anita handed Joey to Mary Ann and said, "Oh Mom,
we're never going to find Grandma." The addition, where everyone but Mary Anne
had been asleep, was scattered far and wide.
Joey, who had sustained a serious head injury, struck Mary Ann as unusually
quiet. He had stopped breathing. Mary Ann laid him down on the couch and
administered artificial respiration and his breathing soon resumed. By now, they
all realized Joey needed immediate attention. Mary Ann dispatched her daughters
and grandson in the direction of emergency vehicles while she went to look for
her
mother-in-law.
Enlisting the help of her husband's brother, Thane, who lived next door, Mary
Ann went out in the side yard and could see her mother-in-law's empty bed in the
wreckage of the addition. She called out, "Grandma?" A feeble voice answered,
"I'm by the back door."
Anne Myers had tried to reach the girls in the upstairs of the addition, but
was
unable to do so. She had managed to crawl into a confined space near the back
door
while the addition was torn apart. Nearly 86 years old, she was mercilessly
beaten
by the storm and now lay curled on her side, battered and bruised from head to
foot.
A few doors away, Jo Ellen Uptegraw struggled to her feet and into the hallway,
stepping on to a fallen door, calling to her husband, "Roger, where are you?"
"Underneath you," he replied; he was beneath the door Jo Ellen was standing
on. Later, they would laugh, recalling the absurdity of the situation. Roger
found
daughter Sara sitting up in bed, in a pile of glass, a large gash on her
forehead. She
simply looked up at him and said, "I'm okay." Jo Ellen found 18-month-old Eric
in
his crib, unharmed. The crib had been moved across the room and turned about by
the force of the wind, the solid wood end piece studded with fragments of window
glass. A neighbor's hedge trimmer had flown into the room and cut off one leg of
the
crib. Eric, wearing only a diaper, wasn't even scratched.
Cindy Schaller lay in the rubble of her house, they members of her family
screaming for each other. "One by one, we knew we were all there. Melanie
appeared out of nowhere and I told her to put pressure on my back. I knew I was
bleeding. I knew I wasn't paralyzed because I could wiggle my toes." The family
did their own head count, shouting, "I'm okay, you're okay, we're all okay!" By
then, rain was pouring on the debris that had been the Schaller home. They, and
several of their neighbors began to congregate at the Uptegraw house which
had suffered less damage. Charlie and Susan Aschliman were less fortunate.
Matthew was critically injured when they found him in the debris. Matthew died
before outside help arrived.
The following feature article appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal,
written
by regional reporter, Ron Seely:
Night's memories etched forever
Sometime around 2:30am on June 8th, 1984, we topped a rise on Highway
18-151 and looked across to where Barneveld sprawls along Military Ridge
Photographer Roger Turner and I knew little about what we would find in
Barneveld. We hoped it was nothing, that we could check it quickly, turn the
car around and head home.
Any such thought vanished as we crested that final rise.
Everything up there was bathed in the red flash of emergency vehicle lights.
In the glare of the lights we saw the shattered trunks of trees, stripped clean
of
bark and glistening in the rain. We saw the shells of homes, the windows black
and gaping. We saw people moving through the rubble, the beams of flashlights
cutting crazily through the night.
"This is bad," Turner said. "This is real bad."
Prior to that moment, Barneveld was simply another small village. It was,
mostly,
a place I passed through on the way to other stories and other towns.
But early on June 8th, in 20 brief and violent seconds, Barneveld became
news.
That morning as we stared in silence from the highway, Turner and I figured half
the town to be dead. Except for the wind, it was eerily quiet as we walked into
the
village. We walked along a country road, careful to avoid large crumpled balls
of
steel that I later realized were pieces of tractors and combines. We were aware
of
dark clouds moving fast in the sky above us. We caught the strong odor of gas.
As we got closer, we smelled the pulverized plaster from the homes that had
been
destroyed. The plaster covered everything--the debris, the ground, the bodies of
the
injured and the dead they were carrying from the homes.
A young volunteer firefighter from Cobb, resting for a moment, pointed
downtown
and said wearily, "There's nothing left down there. Nothing."
After alerting the newspaper to the tragedy, I started walking in the dark
toward
what had been the center of Barneveld. I passed a floodlighted area where
victims
had been treated. Nurses and doctors, their faces drawn and pale, stood drinking
coffee. Several bloodstained stretchers were stacked nearby.
I walked in the dark, scuffling through garbage. I talked with people as they
stood
in the remains of their homes. I watched as they hugged and sobbed on each
other's
shoulders and looked in stricken silence at the wreckage around them.
On the east side of town, in the parking lot of the village hall, I stood
with the Iowa
County coroner and looked down on the remains of the Toni subdivision. He
pointed
to where the bodies had been discovered. There and there and there, he said. He
pointed seven times.
As the sky lightened, I noticed the garbage strewn around the yards and the
streets and stuck in the trees. It struck me as strange that most of it was
unidentifiable. Homes and belongings had been reduced to chunks of wood and
plastic and ragged mud caked cloth. What was identifiable seemed almost macabre.
West of the scarred water tower, a group of rescue workers gathered, preparing
to make a final sweep through town to check for trapped victims. They stood in a
small cluster in the half-light of dawn and it seemed that they paused to draw
in a
collective breath as the scope of the tragedy became visible for the first time.
From
that particular vantage point, one could turn in a circle and see only
devastation--
gaping basements, tilted and toppled homes, splintered wood, flattened cars. I
started walking again through the village. There were birds singing from the
broken
branches of the trees.
Down the street, I saw a cat trapped beneath a large downed tree, still alive
and
obviously in pain. As I stood there wondering what to do, a police officer came
up
and unfastened his holster. I walked away and seconds later heard the sharp
report
of the gunshot.
Later, the day became hot and a warm persistent wind blew across the ridge.
Tractors plied the distant green fields.
You could see them fine up there for the longest time, bringing in the first
hay
of the season. But then they started burning the shattered timbers of Barneveld
in the quarry and the fields disappeared behind a pall of black smoke.
Final statistics: 9 dead; 200 injured; path width 400
yards; length 36 miles;
damage over 40 million dollars. Rated F5 by the National Weather Service.
Survey done by Dr Ted Fujita.
References:
The Barneveld Public Library
Articles from the Madison Capitol Times
Tornadoes in Wisconsin: Two Case Histories by Peter S. Felknor
“Tornadoes of Wisconsin.” 10 October 2004. Available online:
http://www.wx-fx.com/tornado.htm
This will be an ongoing project and as time permits, I
will add new accounts
to this page. Last update: 1/12/98
This tornado represents a special case because I witnessed
it first hand as a
stormchaser. I've been chasing storms for twenty years and have seen numerous
tornadoes, but until July 18th, 1996, I had never seen a bigtornado. As I
chased
this storm across central Wisconsin, I was increasingly convinced that it would
produce a tornado but never imagined it would produce a violent tornado only ten
miles from my house. As sometimes happens during an intense chase, I was not
entirely sure where I was when the tornado touched down in a field to the west.
Even
as the tornado plowed through Oakfield spinning up clouds of debris, I did not
realize
it was going through Oakfield, but had perhaps skirted around the south
side of the
village. At this point the chase was everything--an opportunity of a lifetime.
Passing
through the north end of Oakfield, I saw trees down, but no evidence of the
destruction
in the heart of the village. I followed the tornado across Fond du Lac County to
near
Eden where the storm dissipated. I could have continued pursuit of the storm but
did
not, having run out of film, videotape, and almost out of gas. I rushed back to
Fond du
Lac to develop the film, elated by this incredible chase. Only then did I learn
the truth,
that Oakfield had been devastated. I felt like I'd been drenched with ice water.
Were
there fatalities? No one knew. Guilt set in. While I'd been having the chase of
my life,
people's lives were being violently upended, and these were people I knew.
Later,
when I learned that no one had been killed, I found some perspective on that
day. As
a stormchaser, I had done my "job", that is, fully documented the storm. That
information went to the National Weather Service, the National Severe Storms
Laboratory, and is now in wide use for spotter training. Hopefully, it advanced
our
knowledge of severe weather just a bit more. All in all, it was an amazing
experience,
one that taught me a great deal. That is my story, these are the stories of the
people
who lived the Oakfield tornado at ground zero:
Christine Fearson: At 7:06 pm when the sirens went off, we didn't get worried
because
we heard on the TV that the tornado was north of us, near Berlin or Green Lake.
But
after a few minutes when it got so windy and grey outside that I couldn't see
our
neighbor's house, I decided to go upstairs and close some windows against the
rain.
As I got to the top of the stairs, I heard glass breaking and knew we were in
trouble.
I ran down the stairs and met my husband Tom in the kitchen. He was trying to
close
the porch door by pushing all of his weight against it, but it wouldn't close.
We knew we
had waited too long so he grabbed me by the hands and practically dragged me
down the
basement stairs, and pulled me into the northwest corner. We were huddled there
only
seconds when, suddenly, it was daylight in our basement. The roar of the tornado
was
so loud that we never heard our entire house get ripped off its foundation and
land
in our neighbor's--the Searls--yard.
My fear had always been getting buried under rubble during a tornado, but not
one
thing fell in on us. However, now there was nothing between us and the dirt that
the
wind was pelting us with, it was like being sandblasted. It took days to get the
grit
out of our mouths, ears and hair. Tom felt we were going to die for sure. That
thought
didn't cross my mind but I was very frightened. All I could say was "Jesus" and
"please let those kids be alright" over and over again. When the wind died down
enough so we were able to stand up and look around, we turned to the east and
our
backyard. There, in the area of the Lutheran Church ball diamond was the
tornado.
It was huge, low to the ground and seemed to hover there--a swirling cloud of
garbage.
I felt like it wanted to come back, but, thank God, it finally began to move
away.
Words can't explain how good it was to see neighbors miraculously appearing
out
of the rubble. And to see our son David and his friends walking down the street
towards
us. Looking back, we can see how God provided for us and the others who were
hit.
Within minutes, people were there to help. Someone had tools to shut off gas
lines,
someone else had dogs to find anyone who might be buried in the rubble. Others
were
taking a headcount to make sure no one was missing. EMTs were there helping the
wounded, and almost out of nowhere, there were bulldozers clearing trees off the
streets so ambulances could get through. When we climbed out of our basement, we
had nothing, not even shoes on our feet. Our neighbors, the Peas, gave us shoes.
Julie Dorn, who lives at the edge of town, took us--dripping wet and dirty--into
her
home and gave us towels and the use of her phone. When David came back to town,
he had left his car at Belle Reynolds School, so we had transportation. Our cars
had
all been destroyed in the tornado.
The next few days were amazing. Friends and family spent days in the hot July
sun,
digging through the rubble to help us salvage what few personal belongings
weren't
lost. The things I worried the most about were found. My purse, Tom's wallet, my
grandmother's locket, picture albums, home videos, and even our church's ledger
miraculously showed up. Thanks to the Red Cross and Salvation Army, we never
went without a meal. We couldn't imagine how we were going to clean up that
twisted
mess of house and trees, but hundreds of people showed up with chains saws,
rakes,
and even bulldozers without being asked or expecting a "thank you." We had two
cats missing after the tornado. Cassie was found alive the next day in the hole
left
by an uprooted tree in the Searl's yard. When our other cat, Casha, was still
missing
on Sunday, I prayed that if he was dead, we wouldn't find him.A bulldozer was
already
pushing what was left of our house towards the street for pickup. They moved a
mattress and out ran Casha, hungry and scared but OK. We thank God for every man
woman and child that helped in our time of need. There are so many things that
the
Lord has done for us in these past few months, but the thing I am most grateful
for is
the gift of life he gave every person in the path of the tornado that day.
Donna Boelk: I reaIly do believe that angels were with us the evening of July
18, 1996.
We hardly ever went to the basement when tornado sirens went off in the past.
But that
night was different. We had my four nieces, all under the age of 9, plus their
babysitter,
Vanessa, at our home swimming and I was almost nine months pregnant.
The sun was shining in the west, but dark in the north, which was hard to see
because
of the trees and houses. But there was this strange, non-stop rumbling that went
on for
at least 45 minutes. Suddenly, one of the girls saw a flash of lightning. When I
made the
girls come out of the pool, it I was only a matter of a minute or two when the
sirens went
off. The sun was still shining. I turned on the radio as Vanessa called home to
telI her
family where she was. I was looking for my shoes and Bob was telling me to get
the
girls in the basement right away. Since they were not familiar with our house,
or where
the basement was, I just forgot about going upstairs to get my shoes. The radio
said a
tornado was spotted near Ladoga, which is miles from our house, so I never
dreamed
it was coming our way. Bob went out to check the weather. The girls and I stood
in the
middle of the basement floor talking about storms, when Bob came down and said
how
dark it had gotten, and "It doesn't look good."
Suddenly, the wind started to pick up and I asked Bob to go back up and shut
the patio
door. He came screaming back down the stairs, "Get in the corner, it's coming!"
The power went off, and we all huddled in the corner behind an old furnace.
We were
hanging on to each other, trying to keep the girls calm, and trying to listen
for the sound
of the "roaring train" that everyone says you can hear. But I never heard that
sound,
only a whistling sound. So deep down, I guess I thought this couldn't be a
tornado, just
a really bad storm.
After it was over, Bob went up first, as the kids and I said a "thank you"
prayer that
we were all OK; that no one even had a scratch. Bob came back for the kids, and
somehow found me some shoes. When I asked him about how bad things were, he kept
saying, "Be prepared, be prepared. The block is gone," and kept repeating this
to me.
But believe me, nothing can prepare you for that destruction. My home was
torn apart,
and as I stepped out of my front door, I saw that my neighbor's beautiful, blue
Victorian
home had vanished. Everything seemed to go into slow motion for me for a while,
and
sometimes I felt like I was just watching everything that was happening. It
truly was a
miracle that we went to the basement that quickly, and that no one was killed or
severely injured. Yes there were angels in Oakfield watching out for us that
night.
We would like to thank everyone who helped us in our clean-up efforts--family
and
friends, who not only worked so hard to help us but who also had family members
help as well. Thanks to aid the volunteers and strangers for their help, and
everyone
who kept us in their thoughts and prayers in the days following this ordeal.
“Tornadoes of Wisconsin.” 10 October 2004. Available online:
http://www.wx-fx.com/tornado.htm