The 1,500 residents of Brookston spent Thursday without power, due to strong winds that felled dozens of trees and damaged buildings.
Most everyone in town, and on the outskirts, mentioned the sound of the wind that arrived with a storm just after midnight Thursday morning.
“I’ve never seen the wind like that last night,” Ken Lucas says. “That was just unbelievable.”
The hum of generators replaced the wind, as residents, including Lucas emerged from their houses and saw the damage.
He, his wife and two daughters fired-up the family’s generator around 7 a.m., reattached some siding back onto their house and cut up and neatly stacked the branches of a fallen tree.
Just east of town, Jim Fields was assessing the damage to his farm operation. One grain bin had been blown off its foundation. Another was punctured by a huge block of concrete yanked out of the ground by the wind.
“I’ve lost most of my grain set-up,” Fields says. “At least five out of seven bins. There’s a quarter of a million dollars of damage at least.”
Fields also faced the task of making sure his beef cows can’t escape through fencing damaged by multiple trees knocked down by the wind.
By afternoon, most streets in town were finally drivable after hours of manual labor by residents, White County highway workers and crews from the Indiana Department of Transportation.
And by noon, more than 160 people had visited a cooling station set up by the American Red Cross in a church.
Spokeswoman Wendy Starr says the shelter will provide water and food for residents and workers as long as the service is needed.
Carroll-White REMC communications manager Casey Crabb says restoring power has been slow-going because 35 power poles were either broken or damaged, and it takes time to get new poles equipped and installed.
He says the goal is to get the system up and running by late Thursday night. He didn’t have an estimate on how long it would take to restore power to each individual customer.
He says 2,600 customers still didn’t have electricity by Thursday afternoon.
White County Emergency Management Deputy Director Chantel Henson says the damage assessment will begin Friday.
As of Thursday afternoon, Henson says the National Weather Service confirmed a top wind speed of 120 miles an hour and sustained winds of 80 miles an hour. But she says, the weather service did not see any rotation in the storm cell that hit the White County town.