Tornadoes were skipping through and over our rural neighborhood and our town of Cooper between 7:10 and 7:45 p.m. Tuesday, August 28. While we heard of no injuries, the frightful storm certainly scared the hell out of us. As you can see from the photos here, we were extraordinarily lucky at Simple Serenity Farm, with huge tree limbs being tossed around, but none of them hitting the house. Carla and I and our old dog Ginger sat it out in our cellar. We came out of the basement just as our friend and neighbor Doug Lawton was opening our back door and yelling for us, checking if we were O.K. After the storm had passed his farm northeast of Cooper, Lawton drove through town, noting several branches down and a trampoline tossed into a neighboring cornfield. He learned from a couple of Cooperites that everybody in town was fine. He then drove on to our place, picked us up and we made a bigger circle through the neighborhood. It turned out the damage seems to have paralleled 310th Street, the gravel road in front of our place, on an west-east stretch of about three miles. Besides extensive tree damage at Scheuermanns', and McDowells' and Jim Giese's to the west, there was also some corn knocked down. In addition, a quarter-mile from our house, the west railing on the Raccoon River Valley Trail bridge over Dead Brier Creek was snapped off at the level of the bridge deck and laid right down on the bridge surface. That multi-plank railing, which is about four feet high and maybe 30 feet long, had been held in place by support posts that were four inches by six inches, according to Greene County Conservation Director Dan Towers, so the storm indeed packed tremendous force. Des Moines TV station KCCI was following the tornadoes on radar as they crossed our area, so all of us around Cooper were getting lots of phone calls from family and friends checking on us. It would appear from the way our tree limbs were torn from high up in our trees, and from the way leaves and grass was plastered on the exterior walls of our house, that we may have had a twister bounce right over the top of us. That same thing happened in our first summer here, on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend in 2004. When we've emerged from our cellar after both of those storms, our first thought is that we're darned glad to be alive and uninjured, we're grateful our house hasn't been wrecked, and we vow not to complain about all the tree work we're going to have to do. After all, we've probably just had about two or three more years' worth of firewood dropped right in our yard!

Our big old shade tree in front of our farmhouse is pretty well riddled after tangling with two tornadoes in our four summers here.


Our consolation, with all the tree clean-up we're going to have to do, is we're uninjured and we've now got a big new supply of firewood!

Send your comments to carla@Offenburger.com or chuck@Offenburger.com

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