GRINNELL — “Everything’s gone.”
Grinnell City Administrator Jewel Maier is visibly shaken weeks later when she repeats the words her best friend said minutes after a tornado struck this western Kansas town. “She called me, and the first question out of her mouth was ‘Are you OK?’ I immediately start complaining about my patio table that got flipped over and just demolished,” Maier said. “Then she kind of choked up and she said, ‘Everything’s gone.’ ” It was the moment Maier, who lives on a farm south of town, understood the devastation wreaked on her friends and neighbors in Grinnell.
On May 18, an EF-3 tornado swept into the small town of just over 240 people around 6:30 p.m., leveling a west-side neighborhood with more than 28 houses and outbuildings. The elementary school and a city-owned golf course were damaged, along with a Frontier Ag grain facility.
The National Weather Service reported 13 tornadoes that day in Kansas, six of them rated EF-3, which means winds 136 to 175 mph. The destruction runs to millions of dollars. But Maier and Grinnell residents tend to focus on the lack of injuries in the stories they tell. “There were a couple of people who just got beat up,” said Tristan Bixenman, a restaurant owner in nearby Grainfield whose family all lives in the area. “But nobody got seriously injured.”
Kansas resilience
Bixenman had been closely watching the weather and canceled a planned family dinner in town when the sky darkened. “My parents were not very smart, and they were checking ground and happened to come up behind it,” she said, shooting a look at her mother, Christy Rathgeber, who just smiled.
“I was calling them and warning them to go to the basement, because they were in the path of it,” Rathgeber said. She said she and her husband didn’t realize the storm’s strength until they turned a corner and saw power poles collapsing on the road in front of them. “That’s when we stopped and backed up,” she said. “There’s so much debris. My husband barely rolled the window down, and it sucked the hat off his head. We’ll never see that hat again.”
Once she realized the tornado was heading to Grinnell, Rathgeber said she contacted family members in the path. “We called them, and they had no intentions of going to the basement,” she said. “They didn’t think it was anything. Had we not called, I don’t know as if they would have gone to the basement in their house. “Their house was demolished, but the china hutch was still sitting, and there were still dishes in it,” Rathgeber added.
Kenny Robben also lost his home. In his 80s, Robben had knee surgery and was sitting in his recliner, Bixenman said. “Sirens are going off, (Robben was) watching the news. Wasn’t too concerned until the last second,” she said. “He stands up with his walker and then the wind just starts coming through his windows. He sits down and literally rides it out in his recliner.”
Bixenman shook her head. Robben was uninjured.
This story was originally published by the Kansas Reflector.
