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Tornado season hits late

Photo

Photo by Dan Plutchak

A silo is all that remained standing Monday after a tornado destroyed a barn owned by Kelly and Deb Elliott on County Highway BB in Linn Township.

LINN TOWNSHIP — A local woman miraculously escaped harm Monday when a tornado severed the upper half of a barn while she was in it tending to her animals.

The farm owned by Kelly and Deb Elliott on County B just east of Swamp Angel Road was battered by a tornado that skipped across southern Walworth County, destroying two homes and another farm that were in its path.

“It’s devastating,” Deb Elliott said of the shattered barnyard. “Where do you start when everything in your whole life is here?”

The tornado also blew up trees, utility poles and farm fences. It also gave Deb Elliott a tale few will ever emulate: She crossed paths with a tornado and survived without a scratch.

Here’s what she recalls:

Heavy rattling of the barn’s ground-level windows first caught her attention. Her choices were either to run from the barn or find cover.

Minutes earlier, dark and fast-moving clouds made her fear for the safety of the farm’s two horses and donkey. She put them in the barn for safety.

Then the windows shattered. If Elliott had fled, the collapsing barn likely would have buried her alive.

Instead, she crouched and covered her head with a jacket hood as the building buckled around her. She and the farm animals all made it through.

The next thing Elliott remembered was hearing her husband calling for her, making sure she was all right.

Kelly Elliott had just returned home from his day job as owner of Four Season Pier Service. He rode out the tornado in his pickup truck parked next to the couple’s home.

Deb earlier had called Kelly to get off the lake and come home because of the warning of bad weather, he said.

“I never saw it at all,” Kelly Elliott said of the tornado. “All I saw was huge tree limbs and s--- flying around the truck.”

A half-dozen old oak trees near the farmhouse were splintered and strewn around the farm.

Kelly Elliott said two pines in his front yard were plucked from the ground and tossed like mere weeds several hundred yards from the home.

The car of a farm worker was buried under barn rubble. The roof also was ripped off of a machine shed and the remains of two storage buildings were strewn throughout his fields

Neighbors and relatives came in droves offering places for the couple and their animals to stay. But the Elliotts couldn’t bring themselves to leave the farm, even though it had no power and several of the home’s windows had been blown out.

Strangers also offered to help with cleanup at first light.