By ANN HINCH
Associate Editor GREENSBURG, Ind. — Drivers slowing to gawk at damage on this homestead south of Greensburg were hampered only by curiosity; the middle of County Road 350 West seemed the one place where some piece of the Bright farm didn’t end up after a powerful May 23 storm.
“They say it’s hard to keep from looking at a train wreck,” said Casey Bright, who owns the farm with his brother, A.J., the next afternoon as he walked the property pointing out hundreds of thousands of dollars in destruction.
Five of the Brights’ nine corrugated steel grain bins were ripped off concrete pads, crumpled and tossed easily by the high winds that hit Decatur County that evening. One bin collapsed off the pad, but another landed on the house; two more cart-wheeled into the front yard; and the fifth crumpled into a field across the road.
Cody Maddox, who lives (or lived, depending on Farm Bureau Insurance’s final determination of damage) in the house, was outside around 6:30 p.m. when he heard on his radio about the storm hitting Sardinia, approximately seven miles southwest.
In the minute he estimates it took him to get to the house, while calling employer Casey Bright next door to warn him, the worst winds had reached the farmstead – and Maddox saw the first bin sail overhead.
He didn’t even make it to the basement before the worst part of the storm was over; he thinks it lasted about 20 seconds. “Doesn’t sound like long, but it’s a damn long time,” he said, of having his eardrums nearly “blown out” under it.
“You look around and think, where do you start?” Casey said of the scattered damage. He had several family members and neighbors who showed up with offers of assistance, both the night it happened and the next day. “We’ve got a lot of minds (trying to figure it out),” he said, grinning.
That sense of humor was evident as he and Maddox talked about the storm and cleanup. No one was hurt. Maddox’s wife was still at work, and their child was at a grandparent’s house. Inside next door, Casey, his wife, Sherry, and their daughter stayed safe.
The brothers purchased the 127-acre farm two years ago; it’s just one property in the 6,000-plus acres they plant to corn, soybeans and wheat. Casey said the bins and grain-handling system were already in place, but old and unused for a while. The Brights spent about $100,000 on improvements such as updating the air delivery system and grain leg, as well as “a ton of electrical work.”
Last year, they discussed how to upgrade their insurance on the property, to protect that investment. “Of course, we didn’t expect anything on this scale,” Casey said, indicating the damaged farmstead.
A.J. said the farm is under an umbrella policy they have on all their properties through Farm Bureau. Central to their policy update was purchasing a replacement cost policy on the new and existing equipment and structures, which A.J. explained covers today’s replacement cost of damaged property.
This is especially important here, because the newest grain bins were still more than 30 years old. He estimates replacement cost for the five 40,000-bushel bins will be about $300,000 - not to mention a dented sixth bin, cleanup, loss of other minor property – and repairs to or replacement of the house, which suffered the garage being crushed and roof damage.
Though the Brights were only boys when the bins were put up and don’t know for sure, they figure original cost was a third of today’s replacement value. “You really don’t think of losing your bins,” A.J. said, adding “a lot” of farmers just insure the contents. Even with a replacement cost policy, he worried their coverage might fall short: “We do have replacement costs (in the insurance), but the questions is, did we get enough?”
A nearby Westport resident who didn’t have enough coverage for his damage was Lee Perkins. He was visiting his nearby son, Scott, when the May 23 storm hit. They retreated to the basement; neither was injured, but Perkins lost 30 feet of siding off his 22-year-old shop building and suffered some minor damage to his house’s guttering.
Perkins, who grows 87 acres of corn and soybeans, estimated the shop would cost about $30,000 to replace, though he only spent $12,000 to build in 1989. Roofing and sheeting was blown into the field behind it, as well as some of the wooden posts being wrenched from the foundation. He lamented the Brights’ loss as well. “They spent a ton of money on that,” he said of their improvements.
He doesn’t recall as much memorable bad weather through the area in which he’s lived for more than 70 years. The last actual tornado he and Scott remember was in the early 1970s. What hit Decatur County wasn’t a tornado. Hugh Miller, director of the county Emergency Management Agency, said the National Weather Service told three county weather spotters that the storm would likely be categorized as “straight-line winds.”
This was just one Indiana county pummeled last week, as part of a wider rash of Midwest tornadoes and damaging storms. Miller said as of Thursday most calls to the sheriff’s office concerned felled trees on roadways, but there were eight damaged houses (including the Brights’), some destroyed barns and other minor damage.
“We only had one injury, and that was minor,” he said of a second storm May 25, noting the power was also knocked out for a short time. “I think we were lucky, with no (other) injuries, and that type of damage you saw – boy, were we lucky.”
As of Thursday, the brothers hadn’t heard a final figure of damage from the insurance adjustor. Casey said excavators had moved one bin off the house and crushed two others to haul away for salvage. His advice to other farmers is to keep their insurance coverage up-to-date and ask about special provisions for their property.
“(A storm is) a bad way to find out if you’ve cut yourself short,” he pointed out. |
