Tornado hits Fayette County

By Editor | April 4, 2018 |

“It was by the grace of God that we’re still alive, because if Gene had not been sitting in that room and not paying attention …”

Those are the words of Ann Schwarm on Wednesday, the morning after she and her husband, Gene, made it to the basement just before what is believed to have been a tornado hit their home in the Loogootee area.
Kendra Craig, Fayette County Emergency Management Agency coordinator, said late Wednesday morning that she has learned through a canvass on Tuesday night that there were at least four homes damaged to the point that they are “unlivable.”
Craig said that representatives of the National Weather Services were to arrive in the county later on Wednesday to determine whether it was a tornado or high winds that caused extensive damage in the southeast part of the county.
“We had a couple of storm spotters say that they saw a tornado, but nothing has been confirmed,” said Craig, who was starting to do a damage assessment on Wednesday.
At the Schwarm home, the damage includes both stories of a wall on the east side and the upper level of the home being ripped off.
Ann Schwarm said that they had not received any warnings of a storm on their cell phones and that neither had any media on when the storm arrived at just before 4:30 p.m.
“We were just oblivious to the fact that a storm was coming,” she said.
She was upstairs in the walk-in closet of their upstairs master bedroom, and Gene was in his office at the time.
“I was sitting in the office, on my computer, going through and organizing photos from our recent visit to the Holy Land, and I heard the noise of a storm in the south … and it just seemed so loud.”
Gene looked out the window, which faces the south. “I looked out and clouds were moving really fast up high, and it looked like a sheet of rain coming,” he said.
“I’d seen that before, but it was just so loud – it was roaring,” he said, adding that he never saw a funnel cloud.
“I just heard a roaring out the window and decided that we needed to do something. It was just the noise that forewarned us.
“I hadn’t heard a roar like that – it was just eerie. It got my attention,” Gene said.
“I hollered at Ann and said, ‘We’re going to the basement,’” Gene said.
Her response, Ann said, was, “OK, I’ll be there in a second.
“He said, ‘Get down here … now.’”
“I went first,” Gene said, “and she came running down the stairs behind me.
“We immediately went to the floor in the middle of the basement, and, boom, it hit,” he said.
“The whole thing happened … the first time I looked out the window, by the time we got down in the basement, it was a minute or a minute and a half,” Gene said.
“And then it was over, and there was no rain,” he said.
The east wall of his office was gone, and there is a hole in the ceiling directly above the spot in the master bedroom closet where Ann was sitting, with the fallen chimney held up by the fallen ceiling and the open closet door.
Coming out of the basement, Gene said, “I was expecting the house to be gone, and it wasn’t. So, we thought, maybe it missed us.”
But, they then noticed a hole above the basement stairway, and Ann noticed insulation all over the place.
“We walked in the kitchen, and it looks pretty good,” Gene said.
“Then, I walk in my den … and the wall’s gone,” he said.
“And I looked up the stairs and there’s that hole,” Ann said.
As is often the case with tornadoes, the Schwarms noticed how some things were left undamaged.
A cabinet that the Schwarms had inherited from Gene’s sister, Pat, which contained all of their photo albums was tossed out onto the ground, with the back facing the sky, with damage to the albums.
A piece of carnival glass they received from Saundra Helm’s family was left undamaged, and, “My grandmother’s dresser set from the 1800s, at two different places in the house, with both rooms damaged … nothing wrong with them,” Ann said.
In the upstairs bedroom where the wall had been ripped off were an antique rocking chairs, which was thrown into a bush and not damaged, and a walnut cradle dating before the 1840s. “It was still sitting right here – it didn’t blow out,” Gene said.
A contractor was to visit the home on Wednesday to check the structural integrity of the home, which is the homestead of Gene’s family.
“It was built in 1870, my folks redid it in 1950, and we redid it in 1992,” Gene said. “We’ve lived out here our entire married life.”
“The structural integrity of this house is one of the things that saved us,” Ann said. “This house has huge timbers which support it and they held, whereas a lesser house may have collapsed down on us.”
She said that they notified their two grown sons, Andy and Alex, of the damage. “This is also their childhood home,” she said. “We had everybody here at Thanksgiving, and that will be the memory they will take from this house.
“Whatever happens here, it will never be the same house,” she said.
“I haven’t really broken down yet, because this is stuff,” Ann said. “God graced us with our lives and our wonderful friends … so nothing much else really matters.”
Ironically, Ann said, on Saturday, she was sitting in a training session for the emergency response team at their church, First United Methodist Church in Vandalia. She was sitting next to Eric Miller, a contractor, and J.D. Vieregge, who is the leader of that team.
Gene first dialed 911. “I called at 4:31, so it probably hit at 4:28 or 4:29,” he said.
She initially contacted Southwestern Electric Cooperative to have the electricity shut off to the home.
“My next call was to the Vieregges, because J.D. is our team leader, and I said, “You know that stuff we learned – you want to come practice it at the Schwarm household, because we just got hit by a tornado,” Ann said.
The Vieregges and Miller were among the many people who showed up to help the Schwarms, and that turnout was something that amazed them.
“I think that more than the storm,” Ann said, “the thing that overwhelmed me is the support from our church family, our neighborhood, out bank family,” she said. Ann is on the board of directors of Southwestern Electric, and she said that after the CEO saw to it that the electricity was shut off, “he brought workers out here.”
Gene said, “It was such a blessing, these people. There were very helpful and very supportive.
“There were about 50 people out here,” he said. “We loaded a semi trailer full of stuff (last night).”
Ann said that moving on from here “is a process. We’re going to take it a day at a time, step at a time, and be thankful for what didn’t happen.”

The home of Gene and Ann Schwarm in the Loogootee area was one of at least four that were destroyed or heavily damaged late Tuesday afternoon by what is believed to have been a tornado. The top level of the Schwarm home is at the right of the photo.

This photo, taken from the upstairs bedroom where a wall had been ripped off, shows damage on the property of Ann and Gene Schwarm of the Loogootee area.