GREELEY, Colo.—Pete Ambrose, caretaker of the Missile Park campground near Greeley, watched in awe as a massive tornado took shape a half-mile away Thursday. It landed on top of a dairy, then took a frightening turn toward him.
A frightened camper hopped into his RV, apparently thinking he could outrun the twister.
“I yelled at him to come with me and he tried to drive off,” a despondent Ambrose said after emerging from his shelter, a cinderblock restroom.
The camper lay dead in the front seat of his RV. The rear half of the vehicle rested about 100 feet away.
Weld County officials later identified the man as Oscar Michael Manchester, 52. Manchester had been living in the area for several years in his camper.
Across this northern Colorado county, residents tried to come to grips with the storm’s destruction. Dozens of homes, businesses, farm structures and irrigation pipes were destroyed as the tornado bounced along a 35-mile-long path.
In Windsor, Kelly Keil said she didn’t hear any tornado warning sirens but was watching TV reports about the approaching storm. The power went out, and pea-sized hail grew larger. Then she heard a rumble. That’s when she grabbed her 5-month-old daughter, Hailey Sommerfeld, and took cover in a closet.
“It sounded like all the doors were being torn off the house,” Keil said of her home, which was spared major damage.
She was among 130 people who passed through a Red Cross shelter in Windsor seeking information, food, or simply a place to wait out evacuations from gas leaks.
State Rep. Jim Riesberg was at his home in east Greeley when the tornado swept through the area. He said people were out in the street watching the gathering clouds before rushing inside for shelter.
“It was just eerie,” he said.
Every business along a strip mall on Windsor’s Main Street was damaged, mainly broken windows. The metal roof of one business was crumpled, folded like a garage door and tossed into the parking lot by the storm.
Small Bobcats swept up the strip mall of branches, pieces of wood and other structural debris.
Adina Woodward, owner of the Main Street Music Academy, was sitting at her desk eating some trail mix when she saw the approaching storm.
“It was like a curtain with sort of black streaks, and that curtain of clouds started turning, and we said, ‘Oh, that’s going to be a tornado,'” Woodward said, adding it actually looked “pretty.”
Store customers started dialing their cell phones. “All of the sudden we heard this ‘bam!’ and everyone was huddled and holding each other,” she said. Glass shattered and trees smacked the back of the store.
“The pressure was what changed. It was so weird,” Woodward said. “You know how when you’re in an airplane and they don’t do the pressure right? That’s what it felt like. It was a deafening kind of sound.”
Wilf Ingersoll, water division manager for Windsor-based All Phase Restoration, a business which helps with cleanup and security, said the worst damage he saw was in a vacant brick building across the street from the strip mall. A 200-square-foot section of the roof came off intact—flew across the street—and landed on the strip mall.
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Associated Press writers Don Mitchell, Dan Elliott and P. Solomon Banda contributed to this report.
