Windstorm causes property damage

A severe thunderstorm brought with it strong winds and hail Friday night, leading to property and crop damage north of Loyal.

The National Weather Service (NWS) of La Crosse issued a severe thunderstorm warning with the potential for hail damage around 6 p.m. Friday, for a storm tracking toward north-central Clark County.

Law enforcement members reported several large tree branches blown down about two miles west-northwest of Willard. One WSAW viewer in Greenwood reported 0.75-inch hail at 6:33 p.m.

The storm hit north of Loyal around 6:50 p.m. A member of the public one mile north of Loyal reported several large trees broken, with all trees falling to the east and one top of a tree traveling 75 feet.

Clara Pernsteiner lives just over two miles north of Loyal, near the intersection of County Highway K and Rock Creek Road,. Her two-car garage was blown eastward off its slab and dismantled. The cornstalks in a nearby field were sheared off, as if someone had taken a giant scissors to them.

LeeAnn and Robert Miller also experienced property damage. They live on Rock Creek Road just east of Highway K. They had “eight or nine” trees toppled and the west end of their barn collapsed.

“The storm also took out our garage doors and we had some internal damage,” said LeeAnn Miller.

She and her husband have lived at that location for about 14 years.

“We’ve had windstorms, but never this bad,” she said. Mike Bauer lives across the road from the Millers and had about five trees come down in the storm and one of his barn doors blown off.

“My wife and I had been sitting at the table eating. I was watching our neighbor’s trees come down, but I didn’t know that any of ours had come down. My wife said, ‘Let’s go to the basement,’ so she went down there, but I stayed and watched. During the worst part, you couldn’t even see across the road,” he said.

A blanket of hail covered the ground afterward and oddly enough, “there was still hail on the ground this morning,” Bauer said on Saturday. “The hail really stripped our garden.”

Both families were glad no one was hurt and that they had plenty of help from family members to get things cleaned up.

The NWS does not have a weather station in Clark County; however, its Marshfield station reported wind gusts maxing out at 38 miles per hour when there were thunderstorms in the vicinity at 7:17 p.m.