Westaby had just driven away after the last “kiddos” were picked up from her in-home day care center on the night of May 16 when a tornado ripped through the center of Prairie Lake Estates, destroying her mobile home and most of those belonging to her neighbors.
She has been crashing at her best friend’s house ever since, picking shards of glass out of a few rescued belongings and trying to chart a new course for her business, her 8-year-old daughter and herself.
Barring a last-minute setback, that revamped future will begin Wednesday when Westaby is scheduled to close on a house in Rice Lake.
“It’s a great feeling,” she said. “I’m definitely ready. It’s hard to be an adult and have to live in someone else’s house.”
After hearing tales of her former neighbors huddling under tables and in doorways as the tornado eviscerated the homes above their heads, Westaby said the feature that excites her most about her new house is the basement.
“That was a must-have for me,” she said. “I needed the comfort of a basement.”
Westaby’s story is symbolic of the slow and steady recovery officials report the region and affected residents making in the aftermath of the EF3 tornado that set a Wisconsin record with a path of 83 miles through Polk, Barron, Rusk and Price counties.
The tornado, with wind speeds estimated at up to 140 mph, killed one person, injured 25 and caused at least $10 million in property damage, according to authorities. The man killed, 45-year-old Eric Gavin, was in his home at Prairie Lake Estates when the storm hit.
“I think the recovery efforts are going great,” Barron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald said late last week. “Cleanup efforts are still continuing, but it’s getting cleaned up.”
Fitzgerald said a long-term recovery committee will announce plans this week for disbursing funds collected as part of a $1 million challenge grant created by Rice Lake native and philanthropist Foster Friess.
The committee’s focus has been on finding long-term housing solutions for people who lost their homes in the storm, said panel leader Ashley Rayment, outreach director for Red Cedar Church in Rice Lake.
Rayment echoed Fitzgerald’s sentiments in marveling at the response from the community. “So many great stories are starting to emerge from such a tragic situation,” she said.
Stacey Frolik, director of the Barron County Health and Human Services Department, said she believes most displaced residents have since been re-established in long-term housing.
“Our community really came together on this and pitched in at every level they could to help victims, to make sure their neighbors were taken care of,” Frolik said.
‘Ground zero’
At the trailer home park, which officials refer to as “ground zero” because it suffered the worst destruction from the tornado, the vast piles of debris that volunteers created in the days after the storm are mostly gone.
Darrin Seever, the son of Prairie Lake Estates owner Elvina Gagner, estimated the park — located about midway between Chetek and Cameron off U.S. 53 — is 90 to 95 percent cleaned up, although a few severely damaged trailers remain — some with boarded up windows and others with holes in the sides or tarps over damaged roofs — as insurance claims are finalized.
The storm destroyed 38 of the park’s 48 mobile homes, with many of them broken into chunks of siding, insulation and rubble scattered for miles by the wind.
Seever said park owners are thankful for cleanup help from Red Cedar Church, inmates from area prisons and other volunteers who have helped with the cleanup but said Gagner already has spent more than $20,000 on the recovery. Such an expense is difficult to absorb, he noted, at a time when the park has lost much of its income from residents. Four homes on the park’s south end and seven on the north side are the only ones occupied at this point.
“We have to get some residents back in there to even break even on a monthly basis,” Seever said, adding that utility companies still are working on replacing gas lines damaged in the storm. “I hope people can look past what happened and remember that it was a nice park, and it’s going to be a nice park again.”
Westaby, for one, was tempted to return to the park. She lived there for nearly four years and appreciated the large lots and dense woods surrounding the property.
But now the trees are mostly gone, as are her former neighbors. She wasn’t quite ready to live with those constant reminders of the frightening storm.
“The major factor is that my daughter did not want to go back,” Westaby said.
So Westaby is focused on looking forward. She hopes to relaunch her child care business in mid-August, likely with all new clients, and start the licensing process this fall.
She is grateful her recovery was boosted by a donation gift from Friess, the philanthropist who pledged financial contributions to some residents during a visit to Prairie Lake Estates the day after the tornado and then later announced the challenge grant. Westaby’s gift will go toward a down payment on the house and expenses associated with restarting her business.
Fresh start
Ed Sonnenberg is another trailer park resident who is finally seeing some light after two dark, difficult months that began when the sky turned a strange combination of green and purple just before the tornado struck.
In the days after the storm, Sonnenberg and his wife and four children stayed with a friend before moving into a donated old motor home. When the family had to change sites with the motor home, it became infested with ants and they retreated to a hotel, where they squeezed into a room for about three weeks. That stay came to an end Friday, when they moved into a four-bedroom rental house in Haugen that they have been cleaning up for the landlord after previous tenants left it in shambles.
Despite having to tear out all the carpet, dispose of piles of garbage and treat a mold problem in the basement, Sonnenberg said he is excited to have a place to call home.
“It was nasty, but I went two months without a home for my family, so I was willing to do whatever it took,” Sonnenberg said, estimating the cleanup is about two-thirds complete.
Sonnenberg, who lost his pallet recycling business when his uninsured trucks were destroyed in the storm, is similarly upbeat about the prospect of starting a promised new job in the next two weeks.
Sadly, the tornado wasn’t the first disaster scene Sonnenberg has endured; his family lost about half their belongings in a house fire 3½ years ago, he said.
Once again, he feels lucky that everyone in his family survived.
“We can all still hug each other. That’s the important thing,” he said. “Now we just have to move forward.”
Fortunate call
The outcome could have been different if a friend hadn’t called moments before the tornado and invited them to take shelter in his basement. The Sonnenbergs hopped in their car and got about a mile down Highway SS, which runs right past the park, when the hail was so bad they decided to turn back. By the time they got back to the park, their mobile home and most of the park was destroyed.
“We just missed it,” Sonnenberg said. “By the way it looked from SS, we thought everybody was dead.”
The scope of the disaster was difficult to comprehend.
“Our trailer was completely gone, stripped right to the floor and on top of our neighbor’s trailer,” Sonnenberg said.
The evening’s lone bright spot came when Sonnenberg’s wife spotted the corner of their dog crate amid the rubble and unearthed it to find Diamond, their bulldog-pitbull mix, shaking but unharmed inside the banged-up crate.
As for belongings, the family lost everything other than a few tools and a motorcycle that somehow sustained only a few scratches in the storm.
They received significant help from the tornado relief donation center operated by Living Water Lutheran Church in Cameron. The center, which closes next weekend, remains packed with donated clothing, furniture and household items that will be sold at a “Donation Center Super Sale” Thursday through Saturday, with proceeds to go toward buying essential items for storm victims.
“We’ve given out a lot of stuff, most of it to people who lost their primary residence and didn’t have anything,” said Melanie Kell, who is visiting from Utah for the summer and has joined her family in taking on a leadership role at the donation center.
Tree trouble
On Thursday afternoon, the sights and sounds of the recovery process were evident in the neighborhood across Prairie Lake from the trailer park.
The constant buzz of chain saws in the weeks after the storm was replaced by the sound of pounding hammers as residents continued to put their houses back together, and piles of logs stood in spots filled with downed trees and branchless pines a few weeks ago.
Along 10¾ Avenue, Nathan Olson took a break from raking debris out of his recently deforested yard to recall the frightful night of the storm when he and his wife, along with their four neighbors, huddled in a 10- by 12-foot reinforced concrete storm shelter the Olsons had added to their cottage. They listened as five trees fell on the roof and trees outside snapped like matchsticks.
A branch from one of the trees crashed through the roof and into the home’s entryway.
When they emerged from the shelter, dozens of massive trees were down in their yard and along the steep bank leading to the lakeshore. The lake they couldn’t see before the storm was in clear view. The privacy they relished, along with the accompanying shade, was gone.
Though the majority of repairs are done, the Olsons, who bought the cottage in 2011 and had planned to move there permanently, now are leaning toward putting it on the market.
“Something like this totally changes everything,” Olson said, adding that the couple has spent $20,000 to have downed trees and root balls removed.
The neighbors who shared the storm shelter, Bonnie and Greg Larson and their two sons from Peoria, Ill., have deeper ties to the neighborhood, as Greg’s grandfather built a house on the heavily wooded lot in 1966. The lot now has one tree remaining, with most of its branches ripped off in the storm, and a giant green tarp covers the heavily damaged roof, although the family still uses a dish pan to catch dripping water when it rains.
A smashed boat sits on a trailer outside the house, not far from where two of their cars were crushed by fallen trees.
“It will never be normal again,” Bonnie Larson said, adding that the cabin was knocked off its foundation and likely will need to be rebuilt.
‘Happy camping’
A couple of miles to the west on Ojaski Lake, Jennifer Armstrong, property manager at Summer Haven Resort, said it has been a long two months, but recovery is well under way.
All 38 campers at the resort received some damage in the storm, including 10 that were totaled. Five campers were knocked upside down, and one was blown into the lake, said Armstrong, who has been coming to the area for 52 years.
At this point, all 63 downed trees have been removed, and the resort has replaced roofs, windows and decks on several of its cabins.
That’s a far cry from the feeling she recalled the night of the storm when, after taking shelter in Cameron, she was forced to walk more than a mile because downed timber made the roads to the resort inaccessible and then witnessed the destruction all around the resort.
Amazingly, Armstrong said last week, “We’re back to happy camping here at Summer Haven Resort.”
Contact: 715-833-9209, eric.lindquist@ecpc.com, @ealscoop on Twitter
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