This article was published in The Denver Post on Sunday, May 25, 2008.
WINDSOR — The two-by-four above David Ham’s front door is buried a foot deep in his siding. Inside the home he built 23 years ago, shredded drywall and broken glass mark the trail left by the tin roof from Morey’s Glass shop over on Main Street as it crashed through his living room.
That roof is now somewhere in Windsor Lake in Ham’s backyard, along with a big chunk of his back wall.
“That was some crazy wind,” he said as he cleaned up his home at 130 Ash St., his voice buried beneath the perpetual beeping of backing-up backhoes and the howl of overworked chain saws.
Across a limb-laden Ash Street, J.D. Barber’s house is engulfed in broken timber.
But not a single window is broken, not a shingle askew.
“We’re counting our blessings,” Barber said as a crew of hard-hatted people he doesn’t know dragged limb after limb from his yard into the street.
Such is the fickle thrashing of a tornado. Coming from the south, the mile-wide tempest that scoured Windsor shortly after noon Thursday destroyed dozens of homes, left dozens more unlivable and barely brushed hundreds more.
On Ash Street, a quiet block between Main Street and Windsor Lake, the doors of three homes were marked with red pieces of paper, an official tag from the city reading “Unsafe To Occupy.”
“My garage is about 100 foot out in that lake,” said Mark Martens, whose modest rented house was shuffled about 3 inches along its foundation, earning a flapping red flag warning against entry. “Come check out my kitchen.”
The back room walls of Martens’ home are off the ground, suspended by a single can of corned beef hash wedged beneath the floor beams and the foundation. His garage is a tangle of tired lumber that crushed his beloved Harley-Davidson Road King motorcycle, already in the shop for repairs.
“I guess I’m starting over,” Martens said, returning to his packing.
Worse damage nearby
Still, the homes along Ash Street fared much better than those farther east and south. Entire blocks of those Windsor homes — a little bigger, newer, nicer than the ones on Ash — were ravaged. So the working folk along Ash had some reason to be thankful as they recovered from the tornado’s fury.
“It missed all the important stuff. Thank God,” said 76-year-old Maria “Josie” Rodriguez, whose bright blue house at 100 Ash — the one she’s lived in since 1977 — was beset by tumbling trees but remained untouched.
“I’ve never heard a sound like that,” she said of the tornado’s passing as she cowered in her bathroom.
The tornado passed right through Ash Street, toppling century-old trees onto some homes while sparing others.
When Randy Stafford watched his biggest cottonwood bend and touch the top of his garage, he dived into his bedroom closet. When he emerged five minutes later, he was expecting his house at 117 Ash to be crumpled.
“The whole house was shaking,” he said, pointing to a snarl of limbs circling the shed where he parked his Harley. “Didn’t even touch that shed.”
Ash was a shady street. Lots of old trees in a part of Windsor that retained its original character. The character might still remain. The shade is long gone.
“Like a new neighborhood now,” said Tim Melnechuk, whose 1910 home at 104 Ash propped up three felled trees but suffered only a few shattered windows while he hunkered in his basement with his pit bull, Scooby. A construction worker who assembles metal buildings, Melnechuk spends his days strolling high girders.
“I don’t get scared, but I was scared yesterday,” he said Friday, leaning on a rake in his suddenly sunny front yard. “The feeling of helplessness is hard to explain. When you don’t have any control at all over what’s happening, it’s just a really weird feeling.”
Ash Street was busy in the days following the storm. All but two of the block’s 15 homes were bustling with workers. Crews of volunteers went door to door with chain saws, pulling trees off houses. Several backhoes, plastered with a coating of pink fiberglass insulation from the storm that exposed more than a few attics, dragged remnants of once great trees to the street, feeding most into chipping machines.
“Everyone has to pitch in,” said Evans resident Blake Muhlenbruck as he and his wife, Dawn, delivered extra chain saws, water and food to Ash Street. “We both grew up here. We can’t sit by and let our home go to hell.”
“The sky was . . . real green”
Roni Ratcliffe ran out and gathered hail as it pelted her rented home at 103 Ash. The baseball-size chunks of ice have shrunk in her freezer, which is losing its chill since the power lines were ripped from her roof Thursday.
“The sky was real, real green. My ears started popping,” she said, describing the sudden drop in pressure that precedes a tornado. “Then I heard the windows start popping.”
Grabbing her dog Sasha and her favorite painting, Ratcliffe retreated to the closet beneath the stairs in her 2-year-old house, the only newer home on the block.
“It was a sound I’ll never forget,” she said.
But her home was virtually unscathed. A couple of broken windows.
“We are so very, very lucky,” she said.
Larry Lynch had to carry his ailing fiancee, 58-year-old Linda Drtina, down the steep steps into their dark cellar at 21 Ash. She started crying, especially when Lynch’s ample supply of empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans — two four-by-four feedbags each with 80 pounds of cans ready for a trip to the recycler — began swirling around their heads in the cavelike room.
“He had to hold me so tight,” Drtina said.
Their home of 18 years endured a pounding, losing half a roof of shingles, several windows, a fence, all their trees and a support beam for the front porch.
Across the street, at 28 Ash, Erlinda Benavides finally ventured through her broken front door about noon Friday. Several trees rested on a leaning roof. Many windows were shattered. A red flag on her porch marked the home she had rented with her husband and 87-year-old mother for 30 years as uninhabitable.
“If the rent goes up, what am I going to do? Where am I going to live?” she said.
Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com
