Tornado Aftermath

Terence and I are helping a hay customer clean up his alfalfa fields after the storm. He lives northwest of AL near Manchester. The place where we are working is an old abandoned farm place where this guy built some huge sheds to store hay, and he also parks farm equipment there. An old dilapidated abandoned house sits on a high spot in the yard. The old house survived. It now looks about at utter destruction. Tree trunk stubs, a foot and a half in diameter. Metal sheds lay in a twisted heap. Grain bins full of grain toppled over. Augers and equipment tossed about. Huge sheets of metal wrapped around a field cultivator like a piece of tin foil. Debris from a neighbor's destroyed garage lays scattered in the fields. Pieces of heavy corrugated metal from somewhere, ripped and mutilated into small pieces.

A child's toy tractor, its axles bent, lays lost and alone in the hay field.
The old house, with it's dark empty windows, looks further. The path of this monster appears to be nearly a half mile wide. Maybe there were multiple tornadoes? The further the house looks the more destruction....more sheds destroyed. Groves of old stand oaks shredded and mangled, the remaining leaves turning gray and black from the abuse. Roofs gone from houses. There is the smell of burning wood as people cremate massive piles of destroyed trees. The mangled remains of a large grain bin lays in a road ditch, rolled across a corn field like a toy. A machine shed... the strongest made.. has imploded, destroying equipment inside.


The old house can see the damage stretches to the horizon in either direction, mile after mile of destruction. It is amazed at how many houses survived utter destruction about. One house has been lifted from its foundation and set down nearly 50 feet away, still intact!

The old house saved many memories over the years. It will not forget this monster storm.