Tornado!

Today a rare thing happened here in Oregon. A tornado hit Aumsville, the small town just southeast of Salem where our second dental office is! Apparently this is the 99th tornado to hit the state of Oregon since 1950. It was an EF2 at about 11:40am and it traveled about 11 blocks. There were only a few minor injuries but there are 10 displaced families tonight. Of the 50 damaged homes courtesy of the Aumsville tornado, Travis' sister, Angela, was one of the unlucky ones, but nothing too serious to the home itself, nothing structural. At the end of the post is a link to some aerial footage including Angela's house.

I found this shot on a site that said courtesy of kgw.com but I couldn't actually find it on KGW.


Travis arrived fairly early on to check on the Aumsville dental office which isn't open on Tuesday's. The office was fine but he walked around and took some picture with his iPhone.


















I read someone quoted as saying they saw a trampoline fly over a church. I wonder if this was that trampoline?




I drove out with the boys to take some pictures too.








It took a while, but I finally got through the barricades to Angela's house.


Wind patterns in the grass




















Across the creek in her backyard is a mobile home park that took some pretty good damage to the roofs.


Looking across her neighbor's backyard


The field in front of her house was littered with debris.


Her next door neighbor's camper was shoved right through his fence.


Two more shots from amongst the four other houses on her street to get damage:




Another roof in the mobile home park.


By that time it had settled down some and I went a back way to get around to the dental office. From there I was able to get up Main street some which was blocked off.




Nichol's plumbing and the barber shop next door were the ones to really get hit hard. Someone was even getting a haircut when the roof was torn off and cinder blocks started falling on them!






And driving through a tornado debris path left me with a big old roofing nail stuck in my front driver's side wheel. We needed new tires anyway they're so bald, but this has pushed that up because apparently they are so bald that no one will patch the tire according to Travis. I will take the tires over the headaches and nightmares the citizens of Aumsville are going to be dealing with now. Plus, I willingly drove in there. I wonder how many will pick up an added annoyance like that?

There is some great raw aerial footage of the damage at this link:
http://www.kptv.com/local-video/index.html?grabnetworks_video_id=4458454
The screen it starts on before you press play is actually of Angela's neighbor's house and the guy next to him. In the very upper right hand corner you can see us standing looking through the broken fence. The panning shot of this starts at about 15 seconds and again, you can see Angela's house at the top briefly and us in the yard.