Focht Family Blog

Thursday my mother-in-law called to let us know there were large storms with tornadoes around Indianapolis. We told her not to worry because we were well north of that in a little town called Nappanee. Well…. wouldn’t you know that Thursday night the storms were knocking at our door. We were watching the local news and when we saw a large storm cell with circulation coming towards us we left the RV and went in search of the local storm shelter. We got to the church but it was locked. We drove to the fire station and they said that they were just heading to the church to open it. We were the first ones in the basement.

They had a toy room for the kids so they were playing in there and were happy until we heard the words… tornado on the ground! We didn’t have any more information than that and then they lost power so the lights all went out. We sat for awhile until they said the storm cell had past us. We decided to go back to the RV at least temporarily because I was starting to have an asthma attack from all of the animals that were brought into the shelter. Once back at the RV we found out that there was one more storm cell heading for us but it only had hail in it so we stayed put.

The next morning we got up early in case they were going to come and get the RV for service. There were a few RV’s there that woke up and had no idea what had happened the night before. There was no damage at Newmar but down the street a couple of miles there was quite a bit of damage. They had a boil water order and a state of emergency for the town the next day. The weather service determined that the tornado that hit was a F3 and it left a path of about 15 miles of damage.