Manhattan's Tornado

Well the last couple of days have been a blur. I had planned on having a pretty relaxing weekend. Movie Friday night, PGAV barbeque Saturday afternoon, chores and stuff Sunday. Well, I got to the movie at least.

My roommate and I got a call Friday from Amherst Storage saying that "Our unit may or may not have been COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY DESTROYED in the tornado that ripped through the town Wednesday night." Kelsey told me that she was on her way to Manhattan to survey the damage. I figured I would wait until she got there and saw it to decide whether it would be worth it for me to go down there.

In the meantime, I went to see The Happening with Tiffany, my mentor from work. The movie was pretty bad. Strike two, Mr. Shyamalan.

Then Kelsey called to tell me that our unit was COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY DESTROYED.

So I stocked up on Mountain Dew, took a 5-hour energy shot, and left around midnight. 5 hours later, I was in Manhattan, on my friend Tommy's couch, settling in for a quick nap. When Amherst opened, Tommy, Kelsey, her mom, and I headed over to take our chances at salvaging what we could.

I have never seen so much damage up close before. We started by taking pictures of things we could recognize. Scratch that. We actually started by going, "Oh my god, my chair!" or "Oh my god, the foosball table!" or "Oh my god, is that PORN?!?"

Yes, my friends, appparently the most popular thing to store in the state of Kansas is porn. It was EVERYWHERE. Nothing to lighten the mood like pulling pictures of naked women (and men) off of your broken belongings.

Here's the full inventory list. Bold means salvaged. * means partially salvaged. Italic means ruined/unrepairable. And ~ means never found.

Bed
Mattress
Studio Chair
Red Stool*
Zipper Chair*
Bike (!!!)
Couch
Filing Cabinet~
Bookshelves
Floating Shelf
Studio Supplies*
Portfolio Case
Dishes
Recliners
Coffee table
TV stand~
Sheets, Rugs, Comforter, Towels*
Locker Chest
Books
Lamps
Foosball Table
Nesting Cubes
Pillows

Not much made it. The bike did, thankfully, needing only new tape on the handlebars and a very thorough cleaning/slight rust removing. Amazingly, I found it on top of a comforter and a couch cushion. Both front and back packs on the bike had been blown off during the storm, but I found them less than 10 feet away. We found our belongings as close as a few feet from the unit and as far away as 50 feet. It all pretty much blew in the same direction, so it only took a few hours to gather it all.

While it seems like we lost a lot, it was nothing compared to some of the people we talked to. One woman had just moved to Manhattan and said she had put 90% of her belongings into storage, included an early 70s Cadillac.




And here are some other photos taken while at Amherst:





And this is what was left of our couch:





Here is where our unit used to be:







You can view the rest of the photos on my Mac Gallery.

Here's SkyCam footage of the tornado as it hit the storage facility (southwest side of town) and the campus:



And check out this video showing some of the aftermath:



That Toyota dealership is located right next to Amherst Storage. And the last 20 seconds shows what's left of a True Value.

All in all, to see just what a tornado can do was surreal. I wish I could have stayed and helped the clean up and recovery effort going on in the town. Kelsey and I feel ourselves very lucky to not have been in Manhattan when this happened. And very lucky that we didn't lose many items of sentimental value. We saw everything from diaries to picture albums to wedding dresses as we walked around the facility. Everything we lost can be replaced. Yes, we consider ourselves incredibly lucky.