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Lois and Gene Prindle aren’t sure whether it was a twister, a micro burst, or straight-line winds that dropped down out of the sky and caused such turmoil on their farm about seven miles northeast of Jameson off of K Hwy. It happened in the wee hours of Friday morning, May 4. Whatever it was it demolished their car garage, a lean-to-garage they had built on, and a large machine shop.
"You couldn’t count to 10 and it was all over with," said Lois.
The house just to the right and three grain bins just to the left of the path of the winds had been spared. The roof on the shop blew upwards and scattered sheet metal across a field for at least a half mile, maybe farther.
"It’s a mess," said Gene. "And it’ll be a big job to clean up."
If the roof of the machine shed had dropped downward instead of flying away, it would have fallen on two trucks, one pickup, and two tractors inside the machine shed. As it was, a 90s Chevy car and a 2006 Cadillac were parked inside the smaller garages when it hit. The caddy got scratched and dented and dinged. The Chevy hadn’t been unburied yet to tell.
A restored JD B tractor sat bright and shiny green among the collapsed debris.
"That’s what hurt me the worst," said Gene. He worked on rebuilding the tractor all last summer at odd times. "It was the same type tractor I started farming with 50 years ago."
The storm at first looked like a wall cloud out of the northwest. But it actually came in from the southeast and blew northwest. Lois said it sounded like a jet going through Gallatin.
They rode out the storm in a cellar. They were without electricity from the time the storm hit, at about 1 a.m. until 7:30 that morning.
"I’m glad we were in the cave," Lois said. "Because if we had stepped outside, we might have been out in the field."
The Prindles have lived on the farm since 1972 and have seen their share of storms, including one that damaged the nearby Old Scotland Church.
"We hope never to go through it again," they said.