Dan Parker said it lasted less than a minute.
“It sounded like a very loud clap of thunder and then it was gone,” Parker said in his front yard looking at his leaning front porch and collapsed carport.
Whether straight-line winds or a tornado, plenty of damage was left behind on CR 433 near New Liberty from Saturday night’s storms.
Don Dugard’s shop took the worst of it. All the was left Sunday afternoon was twisted steel beams and contents tossed around as if they had been mixed in a blender.
“We had a forklift parked at the front of the shed and it spun it around and pushed it to the back,” he said.
Trees were all snapped off 20 feet off the ground and the tops of others are filled with metal scraps and insulation from Dugard’s shop.
They were busy Sunday and Monday salvaging tools and whatever else could be pulled from the debris. Dugard, said he learned of it from his son the night of the storm.
“We had trees down in the road all over,” Dugard said. We got down here and found this.”
Parker lives next door to Dugard’s shop. Large trees are snapped around his house. His house itself held up. The roof of the carport fell on his truck and the columns under his front porch were pulled out by the winds.
“I was asleep at the time,” Parker said. “It was loud, but I didn’t think much of it. I went back to sleep. I didn’t come outside until morning.”
“The inside of the house is fine,” Parker said. “It’s just the outside and it doesn’t look like anything that can’t be fixed.”
County fire departments and work crews were dispatched throughout Saturday night for fallen trees in roads, but no injuries were reported anywhere in the county. The national Weather Service has yet to confirm if it was a tornado that touched down in Calhoun, but Dugard believes it was based on its path.
He pointed to the trail of fallen trees, the way it turns sharply leaving some trees unscathed while another beside it snapped into as evidence of something more random like a tornado.
