BROOKINGS — Mother Nature let loose her fury in and around the Brookings area over the weekend, but especially so Saturday night into Sunday morning, when twisters dropped from the sky in Deuel …
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BROOKINGS — Mother Nature let loose her fury in and around the Brookings area over the weekend, but especially so Saturday night into Sunday morning, when twisters dropped from the sky in Deuel County, ruining three homes and injuring two people.
Deuel County Sheriff Cory Borg described the injuries as non-life-threatening, adding that, in all, 10 to 12 tornadoes were reported in the county, including in the areas of Clear Lake, Altamont, Brandt, Toronto, Gary and Lake Cochrane.
“It could have been a whole, whole lot worse,” Borg told the Brookings Register on Monday, noting that sirens were sounded 37 times. “The tornado that hit those two houses ended up probably about a mile, 2 miles from Gary. It was pretty fortunate that it did not get into Gary.”
The three residences affected by the twisters were near Altamont and Gary, with damage reported to one near Altamont and another near Gary, he said. The third, also near Gary, was destroyed, including the entirety of the residence’s farm site.
While the weather was bad enough, the situation in Deuel County was made worse by looky-loos and storm chasers, Borg said. He emphasized that some, but not all, caused issues — running stop signs, turning around in the middle of the road, running into each other, not getting out of the way of emergency vehicles and so on.
“It was a huge issue,” Borg said. “Talking to one of the EMTs, they were just holding down their air horns at some point because cars would not get out of the ambulance’s way.”
Beyond that, rain totals for Saturday night into Sunday morning were 5 inches in Borg’s rain gauge in Gary, and he said he’d heard reports of 6 inches elsewhere.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if it was more than that — with just how the wind was blowing kind of sideways at some point, your gauge doesn’t always get it all,” he said of the rain.
In closing, Borg praised dispatchers, firefighters and deputies, saying they “did a great job” during the weather crisis, including being positioned in good areas to track the storms.
Slightly closer to home, meteorologist Jeff Chapman with the National Weather Service in Sioux Falls said Brookings and its surrounding environs got a good dose of rain, along with winds gusting over 60 mph more than once over the weekend.
He said rain totals, pulled from the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network — aka CoCoRaHS — had amounts between 4 and 5 inches from Brookings over to Aurora. North and northeast of Brookings, it was 2 to 3 inches in the Bruce, White and Astoria areas. Heavier rain accompanied the storms that produced the tornadoes in Deuel County, in the range of 3 to 5 inches.
He said the rain has pushed the Big Sioux River into the flood warning category, along with other smaller waterways such as Six-Mile Creek, North Deer Creek and Medary Creek. As of Monday, Chapman said major flooding was taking place along the Big Sioux near Estelline, with waters also rising near Bruce, albeit more minor in nature. Near Brookings, the river was expected to reach just below moderate flooding levels.
On top of that, strong and damaging winds — think tree branches coming down — moved through the county a couple times over the weekend as well, Chapman said:
The wild weekend weather also left its mark in Kingsbury County, primarily by knocking down a line of power poles near Badger on Saturday morning. That led to power outages in several towns, including Badger, Lake Norden, Hayti and Estelline.
“Otter Tail did an awesome job … they had everything back up by 8:30 that night — had all the poles reset,” Kingsbury County Sheriff Steven Strande told the Brookings Register. “They had a lot of trucks show up.”
He said the trucks came from Fergus Falls, Minnesota; Elkton, Lake Preston, Hayti. “There were several crews there.”
Poles north of Lake Preston were laid low by the weekend storms as well, Strande added.
“It could have been way worse,” he said.
As for rainfall totals, Strande said most of it fell during the storms Friday night into Saturday, with reports of 2 to 3 inches in the county. Lesser amounts fell from the later series of storms that rolled through Saturday night into Sunday morning.
Hamlin County Sheriff Chad Schlotterbeck said they there was some minor flooding, “but nothing we couldn’t handle.”
Nor was there any hail damage reported, he said. “That is very, very good — we’re very happy to hear that.”
Schlotterbeck added that, over by Dempster where he lives, the area received 4.2 inches of rain Saturday night into Sunday morning. The rainfall did lead to some moderate flooding, with water over some roadways in the county, including county Road 465 north of Estelline. Schlotterbeck said it had gone down as of Monday morning, though.
“We’re sitting good now,” he said.
Emergency Manager Charles Jerrick said the weekend weather “was nothing too bad,” with a lot of reporting on rain, pea-sized hail, some wind and a couple of small branches being blown off trees.
“Very minimal damage, nothing reported coming in 9-1-1 phone calls,” he said, adding that rain totals Sunday morning was 1.67 inches in Flandreau, with a lot less — 0.05 inch — coming from storms Friday night into Saturday morning. “We’ve been getting lucky so far.”
He noted that he’s currently paying attention to the higher rain amounts to the north, since that water will eventually make its way south, especially via the Big Sioux River and its tributaries.
— Contact Mondell Keck at mondell.keck@brookingsregister.com.
