CONWAY — Household items are strewn in the woods behind Bryan Delabarre’s historic house at 90 Whately Road — a purple shirt hanging on a branch, a children’s book with the front cover torn off, string from a windowshade wrapped around a thin limb — evidence of Saturday’s tornado.
While watching Jay Patruno nail a bright blue tarp over bare wood on the roof of his mid-1800s house Tuesday, Delabarre said, “He just did this seven or eight years ago.” Then he adds, “we count ourselves lucky in the scheme of things. Everyone’s safe, no one was hurt; that’s a blessing.”
Around 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Franklin County radio waves were interrupted by a severe thunderstorm warning. Thirty minutes later, a tornado touched down in Goshen, and then Conway, narrowly missing Delabarre’s house but wreaking havoc on his attached barn and at least five other structures in Pumpkin Hollow.
At the time, he was upstairs with his wife, Nancy Delabarre. Then the power flickered.
“I heard it coming. I knew that sound — we’d had a near miss when I lived in San Antonio as a child. I said to my wife, ‘We’ve got to get to the cellar,’” he recalled.
Just as they reached the top of the basement stairs, the “back door blew in like a bomb. The sky lit up when the transformers blew, and the air was filled with dust.”
The Delabarres described the scene in the tornado’s aftermath. Everything was dark, the power was out, and it was raining. They climbed to the second floor and found “glass everywhere. If we had stayed there, we would have been ripped to shreds,” Bryan Delabarre said.
Wind was still buffeting the house after the tornado, and Delabarre said they nailed plastic over the broken windows and lit candles, staying awake till 3 a.m.
“We were shaken, both of us. It’s a scary experience, the adrenaline just pumps,” he said. “We’re counting our lucky stars.”
The next day, Bryan and Nancy Delabarre found wet insulation from neighboring houses plastered to the side of their house. Amidst felled trees in the woods lay a section of their turn-of-the-century barn’s roof. Not far from that was the barn’s cupola, ripped off by what the National Weather Service later described as a category 1 tornado with 110 mile-per-hour winds.
“Everybody congregated. Neighbors helped each other out, family and friends helped each other out,” Delabarre described a sense of community that’s taken over Pumpkin Hollow in the days following.
“It’s all things. This is replaceable,” he said, watching as Patruno shimmied over to the barn’s roof, “and we, unlike some of our neighbors, can live in our house.”
Next door at 100 Whately Road, the front of a house owned by Steven and Jeanne Thomas was ripped off. Elsewhere, a barn owned by Jan and John Maggs, which Delabarre said he remembers playing in when he was young, was flattened. Up and down the street, blue tarps covered badly damaged roofs.
Because of the tornado’s trajectory, cutting through the valley from the south, Delabarre said his house wasn’t damaged. The attached barn, however, was blown about a half foot from the side of the house.
Looking ahead, Delabarre said cleanup will take months. He said the barn “might have to be surgically detached from the house.” A chimney has already been removed for safety reasons.
Delabarre, like others, is taking it one step at a time.
“My mantra is put things in a pile, deal with them as they need to be dealt with.”