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Near Miss Recounted: Three Sisters Garden Owner on Her Very Close Call
- Bob Benenson
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Farmer Tracey Vowell Shared the Experience of Being a Short Walk from Disaster
On March 11, I shared the news — with a sense of relief — that farmer-friend Tracey Vowell of Three Sisters Garden of Kankakee, Illinois had been very narrowly missed by a devastating tornado.
In her newsletter sent to followers yesterday (March 14), Tracey shared her fuller story. It's (fortunately) rare to get an eyewitness account of a severe weather incident, so I am sharing it here.
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As most of you know, I am a Southern girl, living in South Louisiana until I was 21. Not a little bit south, all the way south.
With knowledge and guts, you could have launched a pirogue, the flat-bottomed, long canoe-type boats preferred in the area, into a service canal near my house, and pushpoled (yes, it is a word) your way through the marsh, eventually, into the Gulf of Mexico. Again, knowledge and guts, but it could be done.
Of course, that meant we lived in prime hurricane territory, within a mile or two of potential landfall, so no real hope of any dissipation of force or water surge between us and the Gulf. The threat there is very real.
I have seen my share of massive weather events, including the Katrina aftermath firsthand, but nothing quite like this.
I was here on the farm alone, [farm partner] Jesus gone for the day. I heard the warnings on my phone, no sirens at all, did the appropriate stuff as I could, but in all honesty, I had only a minute or two before all hell broke loose.
Everything went tennis ball yellow, and the wind was constantly switching back and forth between full bore and hard stop. Then the hail came, flying closer to horizontal than vertical, with substantial size and force.
All my dogs are rescues, and they each carry the baggage of experiences they had before they arrived here. Two of them will, under no circumstances, go to the basement. So as giant hail pelted the house, we hung out in the kitchen, less windows.
I live with these dogs. They are my family. In a crisis, we will do what we can, and we will do it together. I know, and they know.
After things went quiet for a few minutes, I started looking around out the windows. Emboldened after a few minutes more, thinking that it was over, I ventured outside, alone.
A little more time went by as I was picking up plastic trays that had blown all over the place. Noticing that a few others were outside too, I talked with my neighbor across the street for a few minutes. Back to picking up the trays, I begin to notice a roaring sound that is increasingly, clearly, different from the almost constant rolling thunder, and growing louder by the second.
I literally turned and looked over at the little-used train tracks that border one side of the farm, wondering what fool thinks this is a good time to press on. Those tracks are near exclusively used during harvest season. There was no train, a slight processing delay, and then it hit me. I was listening to a tornado on the ground, nearby.
Again, tornadoes, not really in my wheelhouse, but I did know there was absolutely no point in trying to outrun it to the house. I was way across the field, eyes on the sky, and although I could not see the tornado, I could see the disturbance it was causing, and bits of wood and treetops flying around in a giant churning cloud.
Knowing there was nothing I could do, I stood there and watched. Even then, I had no real understanding of what had happened in Aroma Park. MAYBE 10 minutes went by afterward, I think less, before emergency vehicles started flying down my street, then, a lot of regular traffic.
I found out last evening that many of those emergency vehicles had been dispatched from multiple counties as much as 20 minutes before the storm started tearing everything up. They knew it was going to be bad, just not exactly where. Amazingly quick response, and plenty of it. An easy assumption that things had not gone well in the little hamlet town of less than 800 people, last I knew.
First police, ambulances, even a few fire trucks, then helicopters, eventually giving way to hordes of bucket trucks and heavy equipment. Add all the people being turned away from entering Aroma at both ends of my half-mile street, a serious traffic problem developed and remained until well after dark.
Now, obvious that Aroma Park was hit hard and locked down with police at every entry point, unflinchingly protecting the people inside with their lives spread all over their neighborhood. With a steady 30 mph wind today, gusts over 50, pieces of their lives will continue to travel, I am afraid.
Both ends of the street I live on mark where traffic is turned around, if they do not live inside Aroma. Well after dark Tuesday evening, I could literally look through the trees and see the flashing lights and boom trucks out there, big equipment working to clear off Waldron Rd., cutting and loading up debris from the road, driveways, etc., making a path back towards Aroma Park.
Now, Friday morning, Waldron Road looks to still be far from cleared, the police are still tightly managing traffic into town, and the number of boom and dump trucks has not diminished one bit. Electricity is pretty much back on, but Comcast not at all, so no internet/cable service outside of my phone.
As I sit here, stupidly writing this on my computer, having faith that I will have service by the time it needs to go to set up this evening, I am fairly sure I will need to retype it all into my phone to get it sent. If that is my biggest tornado-related problem today, I am going to be ok.
Maybe half an hour into the aftermath, I called Jesus, who lives a bit west of me in Kankakee, maybe 3-4 miles away. Difficult for me to imagine, the photos of his siding, compared to mine, show that they actually had a good bit more hail than I had here, and all four vehicles his family uses every day are without windshields.
I do not know how I escaped the windshield problem, other than that I park close to the barn, and the wind/flight force of half pound hail, I think in retrospect, being pulled in by the organizing tornado. It was being pulled up and over the back of the barn with such force that what hail that did not collide with the back side of the barn had so much momentum behind it that it passed over the truck and van too.
Wednesday morning, we stood looking at both vehicles with confusion at how they were relatively untouched. Nothing on the van that we have found, only two dings on the truck, and even the sunroof is unbroken.
Home from deliveries Wednesday morning, the realities of what the hail did to our greenhouse and hoops became painfully clear. We will need to figure something smart out for the greenhouse, as the expected St. Patrick’s Day low is now 8º for us, and we cannot fight that without some additional cover. It may be that we have a painful interruption with the tiny greens on the way.
As we started to approach attempting to prepare for the very cold nights rapidly coming our way, thinking we could cover the heated house with a big tarp for the bitter cold, we realized that one of our big hoophouses was in trouble, plastic splitting down the center, right at the top of the arch. Pretty much a whole morning spent wrestling billowing plastic. Maybe it is ok, maybe not, but we have done what we can do for it today. That house is full, wall to wall, with spinach. Hopefully, the wind backs off a bit before much else happens, while we still have a chance to harvest from that house.
Lucky. Everywhere we point, perforated hoophouses and all, we both know how lucky we were Tuesday evening.
And I have to admit that the floor show is pretty good around here lately. Entertainingly, Olivia is having the time of her life working what we call "traffic control" at the front property line. She cannot get to the street, but she can get right up to the ditch before the fence kicks in. With all the dump trucks, boom trucks, bulldozers, and the like going up and down the street all day, loud, heavy, and moving fast, she is right out there, chasing them from property line to property line, shouting at them all the way.
Most of the drivers have figured out that she is not going to cross the ditch, and we see them smiling as they go by, Olivia right there with them, barking out her instructions. If this keeps up for any length of time, which is still unclear at this point, I am going to need to feed her more.
We very nearly lost plastic on a hoophouse today. One of the two big ones. Tarped, tied, and taped back together in steady 25 mph winds, we have one more to pull across tomorrow, and a greenhouse to cover, but it only has holes, preparing for the dip into deep cold.
Lucky, but never a dull minute around here this week.
-Tracey
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