RURAL GRAND FORKS COUNTY, ND – A family is thankful that no one was injured after a severe thunderstorm caused severe damage to their northern Grand Forks County home.
Taylor Sondreal and his girlfriend Lindsey Gerszewski were in their home in the early morning hours of Friday as a severe thunderstorm was making its way through the region.
Sondreal says he’s glad everyone is safe.
“Nobody is hurt,” he said. “We just are going to have to be getting things fixed and back to the way they were.”
The couple works on classic cars as a hobby, and those cars sustained damage in the storm – including one that Gerszewski had put a lot of work into, including custom striping on the car that had been damaged.
Family and friends tell Flag Family News that Sondreal is the type of person who ‘would give you the shirt off his back.’
The storm and its devastation
Severe thunderstorms were moving throughout the region early this morning – including severe storms that set off warnings for both severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.
Sondreal said the atmosphere got very windy, and the rains begun to pour down – and the storm itself lasted only about 10 minutes.
“I was like, well, it’s not any different than another bad storm that we’ve gone through many times,” he said.
That’s when rocks began coming up the driveway at were getting thrown at their home. They then heard a ‘big crash’ against the wall in their bedroom – and then rain began rushing into the house.
They were then thrown off the bed on top of each other from the force of the wind. A wind gust of 91 miles per hour was recorded nearby at the Grand Forks Air Force Base. No tornadoes had been spotted either. Straight-line winds had been observed throughout the region.
But Gerszewski isn’t convinced the winds at her home were straight-line winds.
“I’ve been in straight line winds before and that wasn’t a straight-line wind,” she said. “I would say 100% it’s a tornado because in my mailbox garden, I have gladiolas in there. None of them are snapped. They’re up. And gladiolas will snap and any wind. And these are all laid down.”
Sondreal said he waited for the weather to calm down before going outside to assess the damage.
That’s when he found his 40 by 60 shop ‘was no longer where it was a couple of minutes before.’ Debris was strewn across a large radius.
“Pieces of my building are, I would say, at least a quarter mile or more away from where they were,” Sondreal said. “They’re almost to the road, which is at least they’re going to be close to a quarter a mile. And there’s debris all the way from that stuff back to the house.”
Friends, family come to the rescue
By just a few hours after the storm subsided, Sondreal and Gerszewski were joined by friends and family to begin the cleanup process.
“I can’t believe there’s this many people that care,” Gerszewski said.
Some of Sondreal’s co-workers even joined in to help clean up.
“I’m very thankful I have a good group of people around me to help me out in a time of need,” he said.
