McAlester News-Capital, McAlester, OK

Local News

July 15, 2006

Big wind hits Blocker area

By Doug Russell

He’d never seen anything quite like it. As a thunderstorm moved into the Blocker area Thursday, Randy Lipska watched from the door of Lipska Feed & Grain.

“We saw it come across the fields,” he said. “It looked like curtains were being pulled across there.

“It was the dangdest thing I ever saw, the way it came across.”

Before the storm was past, Lipska and other property owners in the area suffered some severe financial blows. “It busted out windows, did some damage to houses, knocked some trees down,” Lipska said, adding that at one neighbor’s house the storm “took the siding, shingles and roof. He’s not even moved in yet and he’s got all that to replace.”

“The storm came through between Blocker and Featherston,” said Trent Myers, Pittsburg County emergency management director. “It tore up quite a bit.”

Like Alvin Holman’s barn. The sheet metal structure had been built with metal support poles, anchored to the ground in concrete. He had a John Deere tractor parked in the barn when the storm began.

The tractor was still parked when it was over, but instead of being parked in the barn it was parked alongside a mass of twisted metal.

Support beams sheared off at the base or fell intact, pulling the concrete from the ground with them. Twisted metal landed yards away.

“It tore up the roof of that tractor’s cab and broke the windows,” Holman said, adding a 300-gallon tank on another tractor was punctured by something during the storm.

“It was a hard hit,” he said. “I figure it’s going to cost about $15,000 to get everything fixed.”

At Lipska’s Grain & Feed, one witness said “He knew it was going to be bad when he saw a trampoline go flying past,” according to Myers.

Randy Lipska and others were standing at the back door watching the storm when the wind ripped the large overhead door on the front side of the building from its moorings. “It was coming through there,” Lipska said, adding that a few cables and similar items held it in place until everyone could escape safely.

Golfball-sized hail smashed windows, tore into siding and dented cars.

“I figure we got about two to four inches of rain in that little time,” Lipska said.

The rain and hail, driven by straight-line winds that reached an estimated 60 to 70 mph, destroyed crops in the area, including 103 acres of soybeans and approximately 700 acres of corn that Lipska was raising.

“We’d planned to start harvesting that corn next week,” he said.

Instead of the tall, green plants that he had earlier this week, portions of Lipska’s cornfields now hold bent and twisted stalks. “Some of the corn — it shucked it,” Myers said. “There’s nothing but the cobs sticking out.” In some cases, the corn remained, but the husks and silks are gone, picked cleanly away by the storm.

As for the soybean plants, which had been between 18 inches and two feet high before the storm, “There’s nothing left but dirt,” Myers said.

Lipska agreed. “It mowed it pretty short,” he said. “It’s the dangdest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Contact Doug Russell at drussell@mcalesternews.com.

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