Community dispels chaos
Survivors pulled from rubble; residents recount harrowing ordeal Outstretched neighborly hands lift debris and spirits in wake of storm
GAYLORD – A paralyzing injury, houses torn apart and then chaos as people climbed out from rubble — tales of terror in Gaylord poured out Sunday as loved ones and residents of the Nottingham Forest Mobile Home Park trickled back to their devastated community where two people were killed in a tornado Friday.
The EF-3 tornado, which ripped through with winds at 150 mph, left shredded houses and shattered glass where safe havens, resting places, and family bases once stood in the mobile home park, by the description of Joe and William Harding. The two had stopped by the mobile home park Sunday afternoon when residents were allowed back in.
Their uncle is now paralyzed from the waist down, they said. It was his home they were visiting to pick up some items, as most of their family is with their uncle downstate at a hospital.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Joe Harding said.
Officials reported 44 people were hospitalized in wake of the storm. Michigan State Police Special Lt. Derrick Carroll said Sunday he could not release information on the injuries. The names of those killed had not yet been announced.
The Hardings’ aunt had been at their grandparent’s home with one of their sons at the time the tornado blasted through and was OK, they
GAYLORD – A nice day in June tells you a lot about why people live here, 31⁄2 pastoral hours north of Detroit. Two days after a tornado tells you more.
Steve and Theresa Haske’s garage wound up in their neighbor’s backyard after a category EF-3 twister sliced through the city Friday afternoon. Saturday, 50 people showed up to start piling what was left between the top of their driveway and their house.
The Haskes knew maybe 30 of them, including the doctors Theresa works for at an optometry clinic. Eventually, they had to start turning people away. Then Sunday, a bunch of the volunteers came back, and a buddy used both hands to sail a headboard onto a stack of rubble maybe 10 feet high.
A block away, David Beyers was loading branches onto a trailer hooked to his red Ford F-150 pickup. He’s a P.E. teacher and strength coach at Gaylord High, and he didn’t know the people who own the tree that shed the branches amid winds of up to 150 mph.
He just knew that people needed
“That’s the inspiring part to me. People step right up. You never want something like this to make you see that, but it’s always good to see it’s there.”
help, and he had a proper vehicle and a pair of work gloves. So he was driving relays from battered neighborhoods to the Otsego County fairground, where a bunch of kids from the high school were waiting to unload the trailers.
Later, he said, he would be the guest of honor in a dunk tank at the school’s Senior Sendoff celebration, outside on a 50-degree day. Before then, hundreds of other loads of greenery would trundle past, each making someone’s nightmarish weekend a little more bearable.
People who don’t own chainsaws handed out water. Churches set up impromptu food stands. Restaurants gave away pizza or hot dogs or barbecue.
“To be honest with you,” Beyers said, “I didn’t expect any less.”
The tornado touched down west of I-75, in the fast-food-and-big-box part of town where locals stop for a burger on their way to Meijer. On the other side of the freeway, the perky downtown where tourists go was unscathed as the carnage tracked roughly northeast.
Ultimately, two people died, 44 were injured, and the multitudes trying to make sense of things couldn’t.
The collection of modular and mobile homes known as Nottingham Forest was decimated. Hobby Lobby, part of a chain known for staying closed on the Sabbath, was ripped open on this Sunday, with the rear of the store and the roof above it largely vanished.
Beyond that, across M-32, the tornado had been almost selective. At one end of the lot at Northern Michigan RV, a dozen or more trailers lay in a crumpled pile. At the other, an even larger collection was unscathed, except for one flipped upside down.
An oil change shop was leveled. A short walk away, Little Caesars, Five Guys and Panera had boards where their windows should have been, but they had lived to serve another day. The toll could have been catastrophic at a retirement home and a housing development for homeless veterans, but they were 100 yards or so from the tornado’s track.
Whose piece of town survives? Whose Town & Country winds up beneath a cargo truck?
Glen and Belinda Joy were clearing their belongings Sunday from their misshapen 2008 Chrysler minivan, its frame bent and windows blown out.
The van has 200,000 miles on the odometer, Glen said, “but it’s reliable.” Then he managed a smile as he corrected himself:
“It was reliable.”
He didn’t know who had removed the truck the day before, or how. But he wasn’t surprised that someone had.
“That’s the inspiring part to me,” he said. “People step right up. You never want something like this to make you see that, but it’s always good to see it’s there.”
Paul Beachnau, executive director of the Gaylord Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, had surgery recently enough that he couldn’t swing an axe or load a trailer Sunday. Instead, he drove carefully around the perimeter of the chaos, knowing he’d be asked for assessments by tourists wondering if Gaylord is still open for business.
The short answer is yes. All lodgings are up and running, he said. Treetops Resort, four miles away, fielded debris, but never even lost power. Within two hours of the first warning siren, golfers there were back on the course.
Beachnau moved to Gaylord as a fourth grader in 1972. He predicted, correctly, that he’d know most of the people he encountered as he tried to assess the impact while staying out of the way of front-end loaders and massive saws.
A friend had just made a down payment on one of the pummeled trailers on the RV lot. Two 10,000-pound storage trailers had been tossed
like dice behind a damaged Aldi grocery, and one of them held another friend’s snowmobiles.
At St. Mary Cathedral Sunday morning, Beachnau had heard the Rev. Mathew Wigton begin his sermon with a confession. Lowering his eyes, Wigton admitted, “I didn’t go down to the basement.”
There was laughter. Later, as he spoke of the material goods scattered across the city, there was nodding.
“If you think about it,” Wigton said, “it’s just stuff.”
The Heskes, who lost more of it than most, seemed unruffled as their pile of belongings grew higher.
Though they didn’t realize it initially, their house was knocked from its foundation. It’s totaled.
Steve barely shrugged in the telling. That’s what insurance is for, right? And maybe that’s what perspective is for.
Exactly nine years before the EF-3 hit Gaylord, an even more terrifying EF-5 plowed through Moore, Oklahoma, at 210 mph.
Twenty-four people died, 212 were injured, and Steve turned to Theresa and said, “I have a week’s vacation. I’m going to Oklahoma.”
Sleeping sporadically in his Jeep, he reached Moore in 24 hours. He spent six days dealing with other families’ tragedies. Now others are dealing with his, even if tragedy isn’t the term he and Theresa would use.
At the foot of the driveway with the wreckage at the top, a woman on a bicycle stopped and called out, “Need any help?”
Theresa waved and shook her head.
“We’re good,” she said.
Glen Joy, speaking of people helping one another recover from the tornado