Fatal Tornado

Earlier this month, a set of tornados tore through northwest Ohio, killing 5 people (one more died several days later at a hospital), leveling a high school and police station, and severely damaging or destroying about 100 homes.

My parents live in Ottawa County near where some of the damage occurred, but thankfully were not affected.

Among the victims were a mother and her 4-year-old son (the whole family was sleeping upstairs when the tornado struck -- the father later died at the hospital, leaving a 7-year-old girl, who recovered, an orphan); the father of a high school valedictorian who had been preparing to address her classmates the next morning at the school that was leveled; a woman hit by airborne debris as she drove; and a 20-year-old mother of a 2-year-old boy, killed as she tried to seek shelter in a police station. (The police station was destroyed by the storm; her son and boyfriend survived.)

Here is the Lake High School valedictorian, whose father was killed by the storm, graduating later that week.

This is from examiner.com:

Packing winds of up to 175 mph and tearing a path more than 8 miles long, the tornado that caused five deaths in Ohio on June 5 has been rated an EF4 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale. The twister was one of dozens reported across the Ohio Valley causing millions of dollars in damage.

For fifteen short minutes, the monstrous Ohio tornado ripped through Ohio’s Wood and Ottawa Counties. Touching down just east of Perrysburg at 11:20pm the twister moved east-northeast eventually causing its greatest damage near the town of Millbury.

The National Weather Service’s assessment said that an EF4 rating was warranted due to “extreme damage to structures.” Lake High School was one scene of extensive damage where busses had been tossed about like toy cars and other extensive damage was realized on the northwest size of Millbury.

In addition to the EF4 twister, an EF2 tornado with winds of at least 111 mph and one-mile-wide struck in Fulton County near Colton. Multiple houses were damaged or destroyed and trees were debarked from the ferocious winds.

(Please excuse the cheesy music.)



Several days into the cleanup, the United Way of Fulton County asked our VISTA group if anyone might be available to help coordinate volunteers at the volunteer headquarters that weekend. I said sure.

I've been at the scene of two other disasters: a flood in northeastern South Dakota in 2007, where I volunteered with the cleanup of basements; and another northeastern South Dakota town damaged in 2008 from straight-line winds (basically tornado-type damage, but without the funnel clouds), which I covered as a newspaper reporter.

So, even though I'd been inside emergency volunteer headquarters before as a volunteer or an interviewer, I'd never been on the other side of the table.

As it turned out, I did no volunteer coordination or any other real "job" in Fulton County, but I did get "adopted" by some of the head organizers, who basically let me shadow them all day as they held meetings, handled situations that arose, and continued surveying damage.

So, while what I did really didn't feel very USEFUL -- at times I was itching to stop TALKING so much and get out and do some actual work -- it was very interesting to see the operation function from the inside.

I also had a few opportunities to talk about what I do with the Ohio Benefit Bank, and made a few good face-to-face contacts in Fulton County, one of whom is going to attend our Fulton County Expo coming up next week! Yay!

These two guys let me follow them around all day. Jason, the man on the right, is part of a group called Morman Helping Hands, which brought in volunteers from across the country. Their yellow shirts were everywhere you looked. We had a lengthy discussion about welfare and how the Morman church takes a special offering to assist needy families in their churches, so Mormans generally never enter the federal assistance system.

The other guy who let me follow him around was this friendly, unassuming guy (seated) everyone called JT, who I knew worked with the Fulton County Emergency Management Agency, but only gradually realized he was actually quite the bigshot -- Justin Thompson, the EMA director! He graciously let me ride along with him as he toured damaged sites and also took the time to sit down and explain exactly what he does, both day-to-day and when disaster strikes.

One of the houses JT and Jason took me to was this one:



Luckily no one was hurt, but the storm also hit their barn and I heard they lost their horses...

That damage was caused by this toppled tree:



In case you can't tell how huge it was, here are some of the volunteers for scale:



Driving around we saw plenty of damage:

Trees broken by the twister. According to JT, you can tell it was a tornado that did it because they look twisted off. If it had been straight line winds, they would have been snapped off straight.

Dented silo

You can see the swath in the trees that twister passed through.

Several houses had handwritten Thank You signs out front for the volunteers who had helped them.





I kept hearing the largely rural storm victims say the same thing I've heard them say at every other disaster site -- all of them rural -- that I've been to: We're so thankful it wasn't worse, hesitant to accept aid because someone else had it worse. Amazing.

There was one lighter note to the day: We drove past one house whose back barn still had a massive tree smashed across it, but no one was working on cleanup -- instead everyone was in the front yard under tents having what looked like a graduation party. So that gave everyone a bit of a chuckle. Storm be darned -- we're still having this party!