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Woman hides behind her unwanted water heater

HALLAM-Sharon Stimple hadn't used the old water heater in a decade. She'd been trying to get it out of her basement almost that long.

Her sons tried to haul it away but couldn't. It was too heavy. The man who installed the furnace tried. Too heavy.

Her sons decided they'd need to cut it up with a saw and remove it in pieces. The water heater took its place far down on the to-do list.

Stimple and her granddaughter, Cristen, pressed their shoulders and faces close to that heater as the storm raged Saturday night.

They could hear the old house's top two floors collapsing. Then down came the wooden staircase, falling straight at them.

And then it didn't. The stairs had smashed and splintered against the water heater's far side.

It was too heavy.

"It's true," the retired longtime resident said Wednesday, lounging on a Hallam porch with her family.

She and Cristen escaped with bruises, cuts and a newfound appreciation of the basement's heaviest object.

"If that old water heater hadn't been there, we wouldn't be here."

- Matthew Hansen

Storm like a thief that steals lives for some

HALLAM -The neighbors had a pact.

Monica and Tom Sands had a basement.

Three of their neighbors didn't.

So when it stormed, the Sandses' basement door was open.

Saturday, only Steve and Lisa Chelton and their little girl, Michaela, came from next door to the basement of the big gray house where the Sandses have lived for eight years.

They crouched together for maybe 20 minutes, Monica Sands said, as they were pelted with mud and plaster and who knows what.

The sirens had never sounded, Sands said. The storm hit faster than the weather forecast on the TV station she was watching as she peeled potatoes for dinner had predicted.

Monica - Tom was still working - made it to the basement anyway.

"Female intuition kicked in," she said.

As Monica, Steve, Lisa and Michaela crawled from the basement after the storm, their neighbors - the ones they had pacts with - crept from their hiding places, too.

The woman next door had tried to make it to the Sandses' basement. As the storm struck, she clung to the front door of her home before she was flung back inside.

The man across the street crouched in a crawlspace beneath his home.

As the crew that had hidden in the basement of the big gray home emerged, so did they.

Other neighbors crawled out of their homes, too, Sands said, and made their way downtown.

They met at the bank, where buses took them away.

Wednesday, Monica sat in front of the remains of her home, wearing the yellow T-shirt and black pants she has worn since Saturday night, as volunteers helped look for salvageable possessions.

She's found a few, but not many.

And she knows her town will never be the way it was before.

"I feel violated," she said, "just like a thief broke in and stole my life away."

-Cara Pesek