Palermo, NY--Monday night Margaret Meldrim saw a hay feeder fly. The Meldrims had finished their evening chores around 7:30 p.m. after a humid day at their J120-acre Jackson Road farm in Palermo. Looking out her kitchen window as she was cooking dinner, Margaret told her husband Bruce they had a storm coming in. “Then I heard a freight train coming...
Palermo, NY--Monday night Margaret Meldrim saw a hay feeder fly.
The Meldrims had finished their evening chores around 7:30 p.m. after a humid day at their J120-acre Jackson Road farm in Palermo. Looking out her kitchen window as she was cooking dinner, Margaret told her husband Bruce they had a storm coming in.
“Then I heard a freight train coming through,” she said. “I saw my hay feeders that weigh a couple hundred pounds spinning in the air, 40 feet in the air.”
Today one of the hay feeders lay underneath a crumpled lean-to.
The Meldrims spent this morning speaking to an insurance adjuster and cleaning up from what they say was a tornado that stripped metal from a barn roof and flashing from their home. It imploded two lean-tos and sent huge tree branches down on a pick-up truck.
Debris lay deep in the woods two football fields away on Jackson Road. Two by four planks dropped by the tornado stood in the hayfield next to the house. And the Meldrims had reports that metal from their roofs was seen a mile away.
Rubbernecking motorists today drove slowly looking at damage at the farm while the Meldrims’ prize winning shaggy Scottish Highland cattle grazed in the high grass in a field behind the house.
The couple’s horses were in a barn because they can’t be left loose until fences destroyed by the tornado are repaired, Margaret Meldrim said.
As next door neighbors Amanda and Shaun Novitske helped the Meldrims clean up metal debris and branches, electricians and other repairmen were restoring electrical and phone service to the house.
Amanda Novitske said her first inkling of Monday’s storm was when she saw the trees bending one by one. Her husband and four-year-old nephew, James Carr III were washing up when they saw a funnel cloud, she said.
The suction around their house was so severe that Shaun Novitske couldn’t open the side door to bring in one of their two dogs. The 140-pound Great Dane-Saint Bernard mix, however, came barreling in through the door when called, Amanda Novitske said.
The Novitskes, their brother-in-law James Carr Jr., nephew and the dogs took cover in the basement of their home when the tornado came through. There was a roar -- then utter stillness and silence, Amanda Novitske said.
“It was terrifying. I don’t know how people out west do it,” she said.
Whether it was a tornado or not will be determined by the National Weather Service, which sent two storm surveyors to Palermo and Oneida County.
The meteorologists walked over the property taking pictures and making notes about the damage. The weather detectives will piece together their observations of the debris pattern, take statements from witnesses who saw the cloud and review Doppler radar data to determine if a tornado actually touched down, said Meteorologist Mike Jurewicz.
The Weather Service expects to issue a report today, he said.