Storm damage is all relative

Last week's snow was a bit annoying for a few reasons.

I might have lost tens of dollars of recently planted flowers, only time will tell.

And not knowing it was going to snow on Tuesday, I wore sandals, so my feet were pretty cold by the afternoon.

And we lost electricity for a few hours and tragically had to go out to dinner, because a cold sandwich sounded really unfulfilling on a freezing cold June day. All in all, pretty devastating.

But snow in June is a transient event that we'll forget about in a few weeks, compared to what's going on elsewhere.

My mom just sent me photos of a few examples of tornado damage in Windsor, Colo., from a storm a few weeks ago. The third story of one large brick building was just plain missing, while the second story had been stripped down to a few interior walls. It's hard to believe that nature could destroy a solid brick structure so thoroughly and so quickly.

My sister said the owners had started refurbishing this building, an old grain mill, when she was on the Windsor police department more than 10 years ago. The work on it had recently been completed. This must have been very discouraging.

The reason my mom thought I would find these photos interesting is that my sister and her family live about 13 miles down the road in another small northern Colorado town, Eaton.

She was outside cleaning windows during the storm, preparing her house for the arrival of her fifth child a week later. She was oblivious to the fact that a mile-wide funnel cloud was just down the road, until she happened to find out about it from the television.

Then she realized her husband, a Colorado State Patrol officer, was working near the storm and she called him immediately.

It turned out he was not only in the vicinity, but was caught in the middle in his patrol car.

He had stopped along a frontage road, watching for the tornado he knew was in the area, when he looked to the left and saw a UPS truck lifted off the highway and land many feet away along the frontage road on its side.

There was no need to watch for the tornado any longer. It obviously had arrived.

Then a part of a silo flew over his head and landed in the field next to him. A man pulling a homemade trailer with a truck was sent into a circle by the force of the storm - his truck landed upright, the trailer was severed from the hitch and ended up in a nearby field.

And all along the highway, power lines were snapping.

Once the cloud had passed, debris was everywhere, including fences strewn across the highway, bringing traffic to a halt.

At one traffic snarl, my brother-in-law didn't want to move the metal fencing, because power lines were touching it. An old rancher came along, said the fence wasn't hot, grabbed his clippers, cut into it and they pulled the fence off the highway. Good thing his instincts were right.

My sister said her husband was exhausted and soaked when he arrived home, all the adrenaline created by the events of the day long gone.

The next day, my sister was paying more attention and took her kids into the basement because the winds were howling like mad and there were more reports of approaching tornadoes. They were understandably spooked by then, and her oldest daughter, 9, was terrified and frantic.

When I talked to my sister this week, she was still impressed with the fact that it had snowed here, even after what her family, and especially her husband, had experienced.

Of course, watching a UPS truck fly through the air is nothing compared to my youngest son having to walk 1/8th of a mile through the snow in shorts, because the person giving him a ride home dropped him off only part of the way up the driveway. She didn't want to drive through overhanging branches weighed down by the snow, lest her car receive a few scratches.

We really do suffer here.

Reporter Heidi Gaiser may be reached at 758-4431 or by e-mail at hgaiser@dailyinterlake.com