This week's picture is a black and white (click on photo to see in better detail) that was on the front page of our local newspaper after a tornado hit our farm in the early 80s. The storm destroyed our machine shed and the barn that me and my brother are standing in front of. I remember the morning quite well because my brother was the first up and after looking out the upstairs window yelled, "Dad the machine shed's gone!" My Dad muttered something to the effect of "whatever" then looked outside and saw the damage first hand. The barn literally looked as if it had been picked up off it's foundation then collapsed, the machine shed had one side laying over the combine and the rest of the pieces of twisted metal were strewn in a northeast direction across the fields. As I recall the combine, which is the most expensive implement a farmer owns, was OK and the hogs whose pen backed up to the shed were OK as well. Or maybe they were cows??? Ok, I just found another picture - this shows a view from behind the barn and from the machine shed. The bales of hay had been stacked inside the machine shed, the destroyed barn would have been in front of the grain bin in the right hand side of the picture. See the miracle cows clustered together by the feeder in the foreground of the house, likely traumatized by their near miss.
The interesting thing is that the local weather service insisted that there was no tornado, and a watch or warning had never been forecast because we had a NOAA weather radio that alarmed and went off anytime we had a severe weather alert in our area. Remember that this was long before Doppler radar and real time weather on TV and the threats of tornadoes coming unexpectedly were a real concern. We had all slept in our beds through the storm, upstairs in our very old, mainly wooden farmhouse. The barn was about 50 feet away from the edge of the house, and the shed maybe 75 feet. It's truly amazing that the house wasn't destroyed as well. As a child, I remember many occasions where we were alerted to a tornado warning by the NOAA radio, and my Mom would pull open the trap door on the back porch and we'd go down to the super creepy cellar that had a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. We'd perch on giant drums of herbicide while my Dad was at the top of the stairs on the back porch watching the weather. Actually I'm still a little scarred to this day ....Ah, the memories of living in the rural midwest!
1 comment:
I grew up in GA and still remember the tornado out break in 74. It was one of the few times that I really saw my father scared.
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