Was it a tornado? maybe.....

First off, here is a picture from Wednesday night... again more gardening to do!


So Thursday we get hit with some storms, which at first I thought was no big deal. It was Heidi, Hunter, Lauren, and me. I was preparing supper when we got our first round of hail. We watched and talked to Grandma on the phone. She asked if I thought I could get us to her house in case we needed to go to the cellar. About the time we decided to go, the hail quit. So we thought we were good...

Then a second round came through, and we lost our tv signal. I called grandma back to see if she had heard anything or had signal. She had also lost her signal, and about that time, the hail came down again. All I could hear then was:

"Shannon! Get in the bathroom! Shannon get in the bathroom now!!!!"

So I hung up the phone, told Hunter to get in the bathroom and for Heidi to grab Lauren. In the mean time I ran into Hunter's room and yanked his mattress off his bed. I made everyone hunker down on the floor and I threw the mattress up over us. Heidi had brought a blanket around Lauren, and I had grabbed Hunter's comforter, so we all wrapped up and just listened. Dixie figured out something was wrong and she joined us.

Finally it quieted down, and I emerged first. I checked to make sure it had passed and I was sure it had.

At this point we had no idea what happened... I knew it wasn't a tornado, but I knew it wasn't just hail.

Heidi left to go check on her house, and called immediately to tell me about some damage done in town. Well it wasn't much longer Grandma was down to check on us, and we took a drive...


Our town recently built an 'Activity Center' on the East side of town... needless to say the pictures below describe what happened to it. The first two are the debris scattered straight north of it about a half of a mile...

























This is the back side of the activity center. Right about where that truck is, the big beam hanging down is where I recently stood and took livestock show pictures...














This is a shot directly south of the barn... looking north.
















This is a picture of what once was an auto garage, it has since been abandoned...


But the next picture below shows it's roof laid over the house directly behind-(north) of it.





























Just a shot of the sun immediately after the storm.

Now we didn't experience any terrible damage at the house. Aside from the hail ruining the pain on the south and west side of the house, and some hail dents on our fence, we were fine. Our barn on the west side of town however wasn't so fortunate either. We just put money into the smaller barn for our chickens that we ordered. For the most part, the barn can be saved and repaired. But what you see below was once where our goats and mule had for protection... not no more!




















At this point we still have yet to know if it was a tornado or just strong winds... They have told us that the winds were clocked at over 100 mph. Maybe we'll find out soon! I'm just thankful that no one was hurt or anything like that.