Residents pick up pieces
Deadly tornado leaves mobile home park in ruins
PRAIRIE LAKE - Barron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald couldn’t help wondering how much worse it could have been.
Late Tuesday afternoon he walked through the remains of a mobile home park leveled by a tornado that killed one resident and injured two dozen more.
“It’s a miracle that nobody else was injured,” Fitzgerald said. “You can see that by the devastation.”
Fitzgerald said he was prepared for the worst when he encountered the scene, the most devastating storm damage he’s seen in 20 years of law enforcement.
“It was the worst. I just thought, man, we’re going to be digging for peostate ple for days,” Fitzgerald said, considering the storm struck Tuesday around 5:30 p.m. when kids were home from school and people gathered for dinner.
Killed was Eric Gavin, 45, who was found outside his destroyed trailer at the Prairie Lake Estate Mobile Park on Highway 53 about 40 miles north of Eau Claire.
Authorities haven’t determined whether he was inside his trailer and thrown out or was already outside when the storm struck.
the 58 trailer homes, Fitzgerald estimated 12 to 15 were destroyed. It will probably be a week before residents can return home.
Two law enforcement officers suffered minor injuries when helping to locate people.
“They had to lift walls — people were trapped, and other residents who were OK were running and telling us, someone is in that trailer, we just don’t know where,” Fitzgerald said.
National Weather Service officials from the Twin Cities who assessed the damage confirmed it was an EF2 tornado.
“It appears at this time to be a pretty long-track tornado,” said National Weather Service lead forecaster Bill Borghoff, adding that damage extended east across Rusk County.
After surveying the tornado damage, Gov. Scott Walker declared a state of emergency for three counties hit by the tornado and thunderstorms that dropped as much as 5 inches of rain, damaging roads and other infrastructure: Barron, Jackson and Rusk.
Ronald Blomberg, 27, and his fiancée, Rissa Rhoades, 23, lived next door to Gavin’s trailer. They said he had lived there about six months.
Blomberg described Gavin as “very charismatic, very kind. He’d do anything he could for you within his means. It’s very tragic.”
Gavin was a truck driver for a nearby turkey farm where Blomberg also works, and was probably leaving for his shift when the tornado hit, Blomberg said. Blomberg and his fiancée left home about 10 minutes before the tornado hit, heading south to Chetek.
“If me and my fiancée would have stayed 10 minutes more, we would have gotten hit,” he said. “I got a phone call from my old man and he said, ‘Ronny, you gotta get out of there. You gotta get out of there.’ And you know I kind of blew it off, because I’ve been in severe weather before and I didn’t think it was going to be this bad.”
When Blomberg reOf turned, an officer stopped him — the officer had found a picture of him and his fiancée in the destruction and asked if it was him. “It’s the only thing we have left of our home,” he said of the picture.
He hopes he can find their wedding bands, including an engagement ring that belonged to Rhoades’ great-grandmother. He also hoped to find their cats, which he described as their kids.
“I look at it with a heavy heart,” Blomberg said, gazing out over the destruction. “I’m grateful that me and my fiancée got out, because we could have been right there with our next door neighbor, Eric, and he was a great guy. He was a great man.”
There is no designated storm shelter on the park property, but the sheriff said people were alerted by several tornado warnings before the twister hit. A phone alert was issued, and sirens were activated about 25 minutes before it hit. But the sheriff couldn’t confirm if mobile home park residents could hear the sirens.
An emergency shelter at telecommunications co-op Mosaic opened half an hour after the tornado, and cots were set up by 11 p.m., Fitzgerald said. Two people and one dog stayed in the shelter Tuesday night.
By 11:25 p.m. – six hours after the tornado touched down – everyone had been accounted for.
The sheriff commended local first responders for dropping whatever they were doing — track meets, softball games, in dress clothes from other jobs — to help.