Tornado on the ground; moments of terror, near misses

Sugar Valley resident Michael Evans picks up the pieces of his demolished mobile home preparing to throw it in a dumpster. Evans was in the home when the tornado hit on Monday evening, April 13. The two Corvettes in the background were in a garage, according to Evans. The garage was blown away, but the 'Vettes had little damage. (Photos by Roger Sims / Linn County Journal)

By Roger Sims, Journal staff

linncountyjournal@icloud.com

Michael Evans was in a bedroom at one end of the mobile home he shared with Michelle Lutz. He had just received notice on his phone of a tornado warning in the area when he felt the walls of the mobile home shake.

In a flash both he and Lutz were on the ground outside and the home, at the very east side of the Sugar Valley Lakes development, was completely demolished. Remarkably, both Evans and Lutz had fairly minor injuries, however, their lives had been reduced to rubble.

“Everything’s gone,” the retiree said Tuesday morning as he pitched twisted metal sheathing, scraps of insulation and some splintered pieces of wood into a dumpster.

Because of the age of the mobile home, he said it was uninsurable. Fortunately for the couple, his father lives on the west side of the lake, so they had temporary shelter as they try to rebuild their lives.

Large trees were shredded behind a house on Scott Road.

The tornadoes that ripped through southern Linn County on Monday evening, left a lot of damage, but somehow everyone escaped serious injuries. It was also a story of near misses.

Lorri Wilburn and Jim Dick, who live across the road from the Mine Creek Battlefield State Historic Site, had a moment’s notice that the potentially deadly twister was headed their way and ducked into their basement for shelter. However, Wilburn said by the time she reached the bottom step, the storm was gone.

She said she rushed outside to check on a horse that was in a paddock next to the house. Behind the house trees were uprooted or had branches ripped off. North of the house, the roof of the shop was torn up, but the walls were intact and the contents didn’t appear to be severely damaged. The horse suffered some cuts, but Wilburn said it appeared to have escaped serious injury.

Across the road from their house, large trees on the Mine Creek battlefield land laid sideways, ripped out of the ground.

Volunteers work to pull an upside down dock off the main lake's dam at Sugar Valley. In the foreground is a battered paddle board that also washed up on the dam.

Back at Sugar Valley Lakes, a crew of volunteers worked to pull a dock that had been torn away from its moorings and partially beached on the main lake’s dam. After considerable effort the volunteers were finally able to hoist it on to dry land.

Sugar Valley resident Shelly Collins, who used her car to blockade the dam road while the extraction was taking place, along with a friend picked items that had blown up against the dam by the storm and put them on a trailer to be hauled away. Their haul included a splintered paddle board, floats from docks and other debris.

Collins said that she and others had watched the tornado skim over the top of the development from the club house, which is perched on a hill on the northwest corner of the development.

Above, a dock belonging to James Mairet came to rest upside down just a few feet from his home. He said despite the wind, his home suffered only minor damage. Below, across the cove another dock floated upside down while a boat cover remains intact. According to Mairet, the dock that beached on the dam came from this area.

On the south cove of the main lake, James Mairet was visiting a neighbor across from his home. The tornado had lifted his dock out of the water and laid it upside down near his home. He said that other than some slight damage, like an airconditioning coil being moved, his house had little damage even though it was higher on the bank and less than 25 yards away.

In the cove another dock floated upside down with a floating chair with a cup holder floating nearby.

To the west of the lake development, one county crew was hauling a skid steer loader with a grabbing attachment. The truck driver said they had just finished clearing downed trees out of the road and were headed east toward Blue Mound to clear another roadway.

A caravan of Heartland Rural Electric Cooperative trucks moved along a dirt road after repairing downed lines, another truck with a bucket lift had a lineman working to reconnect power to a line heading south.

The tornado uprooted a giant shade tree with a 3-foot diameter trunk close to Roy Bright's home. Below, the view from the other side shows just how close the tornado came to his home.

On the east side of the lake, a quarter mile west of Scott Road on 750 Road, a tree about 3 feet in diameter lay partially tilted on its side. Pulled partially out by the roots, the tree left an indentation about 8 feet wide by 3 feet deep in the ground.

The tree had been a shade tree in the front yard of Roy Bright’s home, which was about 30 yards away from where a building and and the tree were collapsed in a heap. Further east was a barn, now without a roof. A tractor that was once kept under cover now open to the sky.

“We saw it coming,” he said, pointing toward the fairly flat fields to the west. As it got closer, he went to the bathroom in the center of the house, hoping it was enough to be safe. It was. By about 30 yards.

As for the contents of the sheds, "It's just things," he said. "Just things."