Southern Wisconsin takes stock of losses after destructive Saturday night tornadoes (2024)

Jannine Klecker believes her late father, Louie, saved the family farm from total destruction during Saturday’s storm.

The roughly 120-year-old property in the town of Medina, south of Marshall, took a direct hit from an EF-1 tornado on Saturday. The tornado was one of six confirmed by the National Weather Service to have formed over five counties in southern Wisconsin between 5:30 and 8:30 p.m. Saturday.

The storm also produced an EF-2 tornado in Janesville, in Rock County, that damaged multiple homes and trapped people in their basem*nts on the city’s south side, and in Argyle, in Lafayette County, where the 129-year-old Apple Grove Lutheran Church was destroyed. It also spawned EF-1 tornadoes south of Waterloo and west of Watertown, both in Jefferson County, and east of Fontana-on-the-Lake and east of Delavan, both in Walworth County.

Klecker dashed for the basem*nt — irate cat in tow — when she heard the wind start to blow in two directions at once. She emerged a few minutes later to find her childhood home unrecognizable.

Huge oak trees lay in tangled heaps. Shreds of yellow insulation were wound like tinsel around the branches of uprooted pines. Strips of sheet metal dangled from the battered buildings. The tornado flattened most of the barn and the 60-foot-tall silo behind it, blew out a wall of the original cinder block barn and tore the roof off her father’s shop.

The cattle all made it. Nine chickens survived. They found one chicken “flat as a pancake,” Klecker said. Four others and a striped barn cat named Tigtig are still missing.

The house, where Klecker lives, weathered the storm mostly intact, save for a few broken windows. And the machine shed, where her father’s prized tractor sits, is unscathed.

“I could just see him up there,” Klecker said. “Nobody was touching Dad’s tractor. He was up there doing that.”

Friends and neighbors started arriving to help with cleanup almost as soon as the storm ended. Klecker, who is 60, said she hadn’t seen some of them since high school. “They just came out of the woodwork,” she said.

Many of them, she said, came because they wanted to support her father, who died in 2003.

Unlike many of their neighbors, Klecker’s father didn’t have a day job that took him away from farming, she said. He would cut and bale other farmers’ hay while they were at work, and they were always asking him for advice.

“He just gave so much,” Klecker said. “This is a payback. They could never help him. He died on them. So they’ve just been helping.”

Next door, the racing community turned out to support the Stark family, whose back shop was dismantled by the tornado with three of their race cars and years of trophies and mementos inside. They’re not sure yet if any of the cars can be salvaged.

Racing has been the family’s livelihood for well over a decade, said Kiersten Stark, whose husband and 16-year-old son both race. Their priority in the aftermath of the storm was to take care of the cars. Then they began removing the fallen trees and the rest of the debris from their property. The damage to their house, like Klecker’s, was minor.

The Starks were planning to race one of the cars the weekend after next. They’re hoping it will still be up to the task.

Devastation in Janesville

The precision was almost surgical, the way the Janesville tornado’s path split through the MacFarlane Pheasants, Inc. farm along Highway 51 on Janesville’s south side Saturday night.

Of six brooder barns, which hold thousands of pheasant chicks from the time they’re six or seven weeks old, four are destroyed beyond repair, owner Bill MacFarlane said Monday. A fifth sustained serious damage and it’s a coin-flip whether it too will need to be torn down. In an odd twist of fate, the barn in the middle of them all was untouched by the tornado’s wrath.

Thousands of adult pheasants escaped when 20 acres of netted outdoor pens they lived in were also ripped apart, MacFarlane said.

“The problem is, is the birds in those pens are much bigger and older, and their pens have been ripped open, so the birds figure out pretty quickly that they’re not in a pen anymore. So we have lots and lots of birds out,” MacFarlane said. “But birds know where the food and the water is, and generally speaking, I would estimate probably half of them will come back.”

Preliminary city estimates put the storm’s price tag at $20 million, with six homes considered uninhabitable and varying levels of damage to dozens of others in a handful of pockets near highways 11 and 51, Janesville City Manager Kevin Lahner said Monday. It’s the costliest weather event in recent history, outpacing the cost of flooding damage in 2012.

“The biggest impact is really the trees,” Lahner said. “There are just hundreds of trees that have been destroyed as part of the storm, many of them snapped off or completely uprooted. So that is the main cause of concern at the moment.”

To handle the increase in brush and tree cleanup, city public works employees will work 12-hour shifts through July 3, when the city will reevaluate the need for longer hours. The city will waive fees at its compost center and landfill for affected city residents.

The city and Rock County Emergency Management will host a drop-in disaster relief and information session from noon to 6 p.m. Tuesday at Dr. Daniel Hale Williams County Resource Center, 1717 Center Ave.

In the city of Janesville, all roads are open minus one: Oak Hill Road, as workers try to round up pheasants that escaped from MacFarlane’s farm, Lahner said. Alliant Energy has restored power to all but one home as of Monday afternoon.

Along South River and Avalon roads, the landscape is almost unrecognizable from before, storm chaser and Janesville resident Tom Purdy said.

Purdy had started his day in Argyle, stopping for lunch — not far from where the Apple Grove Lutheran Church was leveled hours later — before making his way to Darlington and following the storm back. Once he reached Monroe, he thought the storm was pretty much done but kept going.

Running low on gas, Purdy stopped at the Kwik Trip on Court Street, on Janesville’s southwest side. From there, Purdy could see the wall cloud and the rotation start.

“Of course there’s excitement, adrenaline,” Purdy said. ”But there’s also the thought, ‘This is where I live. This is my hometown’ … helpless was the thought that came to my mind.”

An unusually active tornado season

Through the end of May, Wisconsin already had been hit by 23 tornadoes this year, which is how many tornadoes the state typically sees in a full year, the National Weather Service said.

There’s potential for severe storms again late Monday night into early Tuesday morning. The storms are expected to gain momentum and move through southern Wisconsin by midnight and could involve strong, damaging winds, heavy rainfall and small hail.

Flash flooding is also a concern, given the amount of rain Wisconsin has seen in recent days.

Some areas have already experienced flooding from the weekend’s storms. In Waupun, the city was under a disaster declaration Saturday as most streets were underwater and the Rock River’s water level was two feet higher than normal.