To start I was still at work…teaching practice to two students. It’s January and there was a thunderstorm which for Kentucky is HIGHLY usual ßbet you thought I’d say unusual didn’t ya? Nope, it’s Kentucky and strange weather happens here all the time. Still I don’t think I have experienced a thunderstorm in January for as long as I can remember (sadly that’s only a few years- I blame the several concussions I have had in my life..I think my brains are a little scrambled, especially in the memory department). I had told both of the students if the horses got rambunctious to just dismount and we would see if it passed over. Right about the time it started easing up my boss comes into the arena. She wanted to tell me some things, but her phone rang so she answered it. Amidst my teaching I hear her yelling into her phone, “WHAT? A Tornado? Just now? AT JULIES?” I spun around so fast I almost fell. It was a student who works for Julie telling her that she wasn’t going to make practice because she was helping clean up from what they thought was a tornado at the farm where I live and my horses live. Needless to say practice ended while I made a phone call to my roommate to see if everything was ok. When I called Kerry said yes everything was ok and asked why? I told her about my boss’s phone call and Kerry flipped out. She said, “that’s why the house shook so hard and all of the pictures fell off the walls!” I then called Julie to check on her and got the whole story.
She had just pulled in to the farm from grabbing lunch and was sitting in her car eating and waiting out the storm (its Kentucky these things pass fast) when the wind picked up and she watched the barn roof pass her car and hit the electric line that goes into the barn on the way by. It also hit a limb on the nearby tree dropping a branch on her trucks window, smashing it and then picked up the front end of one of the trailers and rotated it a couple feet. The electric line started sparking so Julie called….411…nerves will do that to you and somehow a 9 turns into a 4 when you are watching your livelihood fall apart and the animals you love be in danger. Bless the lady on the other end for calling the fire department for Julie. The most amazing part was the Scott Co Fire Departments response time…6 minutes…we live in the far boonies in Scott Co and they were wicked fast. It was amazing. The turned off the electric line and put out the fire before it got worse. In the meantime Julie and Arizona Hillary turned out all of the terrified horses in the barn. And poor Kerry never even heard the Fire trucks coming down our driveway, sirens blaring…
I decided to leave work for the day and go help with cleanup/moral support. When I got home I was floored to see what had happened. That sheet metal roof weighed hundreds of pounds (I know because we moved some later) and some of it ended up all the way down the road in the farm owner’s yard! There was a small group already doing debris cleanup so Kerry (who came out of the house finally) and I climbed in the rafters of the barn to tarp over the exposed stalls to keep them dry until the roof got replaced. It took us over 3 hours, but we got it done. It was great Tough Mudder training…hanging on for dear life in those rafters and hammering nails at odd angles with nothing to balance with, then swinging like a monkey to the next place. Later we moved some of the roof, I was grateful that I happened to be wearing glasses that day the metal that I was carrying whipped back and smacked me in the face. I have an awesome bruise on my nose as a result.
Somehow in all of this I managed not to fall out of the rafters yet get slapped by sheet metal…the day is not complete until you get slapped by sheet metal. Oh, and you get filmed by the local news channel (Channel 27 woot woot!)- and naturally he chose to film nice butt shots of Kerry and me in the rafters…
This is how we found out on Wednesday that we got lucky. The National Weather Service came out to assess the damage and said it was straight line winds that hit us…and then went a half mile away and became an EF-1 Tornado that flattened another barn (no horses inside). If that had been a tornado when it hit us, this whole story could be very sad. As it is, the electric company fixed the barn electricity the next day, there is an awesome Amish contracting group that has already done some barn work for Heronwood that will be fixing the roof today (Thursday) and hauling away all of the other debris, and the insurance company fixed the windshield of Julies truck for free. All that was lost in our house was a couple of picture frames and the little “turny vent thingy” from the roof over my roommate’s bathroom (which incidentally is probably REALLY bad…for reasons I am sure you can guess).
It could have been much worse. No animals or people were harmed and everything is fixable. I hope to never encounter a situation like this again in my lifetime... So, now that I have told and retold this little tale it’s time to move on….
Signing off~
Mandy
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