But virtually nothing was spared at the farmstead owned by Rob and Laurel Marlatt along Nebraska 14 between Aurora and Interstate 80.
ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Thursday, May 29, 2008 7:00 pm
AURORA — You could call it a weather weapon of mass destruction and, as usual in Nebraska, its aim was on the fickle side.
It lifted the thin plastic tube from Curtis Marlatt’s rain gauge and dropped it into the grass just a few feet away without even breaking it.
Then it tore the dormers off the top of Marlatt’s two-story house two miles south of town, knocked a huge hole in the wall and dropped the garage roof on his truck.
“I can’t find my hearing aids,” Marlatt, 63, said Friday as he looked toward his front door. “They’re in there somewhere.”
There was more fickleness elsewhere:
* A foot-thick tree limb fell inches short of the stone tablets in the war memorial outside the Hamilton County Courthouse.
* Harvey Bish’s treasured 1966 Ford Mustang suffered barely a scratch, even as the front of the building that housed it caved in and the much less valuable truck next to it was crushed.
But virtually nothing was spared at the farmstead owned by Rob and Laurel Marlatt along Nebraska 14 between Aurora and Interstate 80. One of 14 destroyed grain bins ended up on the roof of the house as the family huddled in the basement.
Curtis Marlatt’s daughter-in-law Laurel Marlatt was much more focused on the lives and limbs of her husband and two sons than on the tree that straddled the area where her kitchen ceiling had so recently been.
“We were blessed,” she said.
Considering the lashing that Nebraska took Thursday night, the state overall was fortunate as well.
Two waves of tornadic storms swept across sections of the state between about 5 p.m. and midnight. At least four tornadoes are thought to have touched down in Kearney. Another touched down west of Grand Island, but lifted before causing any damage. An uncertain number of tornadoes then took aim at Southeast Nebraska, with serious damage being reported in at least three counties.
Yet no deaths or serious injuries were reported.
The preliminary National Weather Service diagnosis of the storm that pounded this community shortly before sunset Thursday night includes at least one tornado funnel and straight-line winds exceeding 80 mph.
Aurora’s approximately 4,500 residents dodged the worst of the damage. But a rural area south of town, stretching five to six miles wide and about 10 miles east to west from the Hampton area toward Giltner, looked like it had been picked up, crumpled and tossed back down from the sky.
About a dozen railroad cars were dumped on their sides about four miles east of Aurora. For at least 40 miles east toward Seward, center-pivot irrigation units were flipped upside down. An Alltel cell tower assumed the shape of a twisted metal pretzel after it collapsed south of Aurora.
One of the early mysteries was the shopping cart along the shoulder of U.S. 34 about a mile east of Hampton.
As Laurel Marlatt stood on what was left of her porch, she watched a procession of neighbors clearing rubble from the driveway and an even longer procession of cars slowing down on the highway or stopping for pictures.
There wasn’t a hint of bitterness in her voice about people who had time for that. They were just curious, she said.
“You know, we’re all OK. We have two boys, 6 and 9, and we were in the southwest corner of the basement. And we heard it and we knew when it hit. And we’re OK — not wet, dirty or scratched or anything.
“We survived a tornado,” she said in a wondrous tone.
Rob Marlatt, 40, was already talking about how to get back to his farming routine.
“We’ll rebuild,” he said. “It’s all insured.”
But the couple’s composure was still a little thin the day after a farmstead in one of the state’s most prosperous farming counties was reduced to battered inventory bound for an insurance adjuster’s claims sheet.
The Marlatts both lost their voices briefly as they answered questions.
“Everybody is very emotional,” Rob Marlatt said.
Just six months after he became the county’s emergency management director, Kirt Smith had a full-blown emergency on his hands.
As he leaned on a railing outside the Aurora Fire Department shop about noon on Friday, Smith offered an update on a long list of what was done and what was left to be done.
On the plus side, “Everybody is accounted for. All the houses have been gone through. That was done last night.”
On the minus side, an estimated 250 homes were still without power, and U.S. 14 remained closed south of the Interstate 80 interchange because of downed electrical transmission lines.
Smith said power is likely to be restored countywide by Sunday.
Volunteer Alan Brisnehan of Grand Island said the Red Cross offered temporary quarters Thursday night at the county fairgrounds. But in a town where people are used to picking each other up and taking each other in, only one refugee slept there.
“There’s quite a bit of damage south of town,” Brisnehan said. “North of town is not so bad.”
Harvey Bish sounded cheerful as he showed how the truck and camper had saved his Mustang, including its retractable hardtop, in a mangled building on Aurora’s southern outskirts.
More than 70 other vintage cars stored there, from a 1918 Oldsmobile touring car to a 1978 Cadillac El Dorado, fared equally well.
The steel structure surrounding them was another story.
“I thought this building was indestructible,” Bish said, “but nothing is.”
Reach Art Hovey at (402) 473-7223 or ahovey@journalstar.com