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Mar 23, 2008 7:15 pm US/Central
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10 Years Later: Survivors Recall St. Peter Tornado
ST. PETER, Minn. (WCCO) ―
On March 29, 1998, an F-3 tornado hit the community of St. Peter. A couple days later, we asked a handful of St. Peter residents to keep journals documenting their town's recovery and their own. We caught up with a couple of them last week.
Lynn Wunderlich said the tornado is like a bookmark in her life.
"We'll use the term, 'Oh, that was before the tornado' or whatever ... we talk about it a lot."
Back then, trees impaled Lynn's home. It was another tree she wrote about in the journal, the one in the front yard that broke her heart.
"I had cried a bucket of tears," she wrote. "The tree contractor wanted to take the tree down. An hour or so later, a really nice city worker put his arm around me and said, 'It needed to go.'"
"That was a very emotional time for me," recalled Lynn. "It was like 125 years of history was going away."
Fortunately, the pain she felt in '98 is pretty much gone. Lynn can't step foot in her front yard without seeing a reminder of what she lost.
"The stump is still here," she laughed. "It kind of has just sat here, and it's starting to rot away, very well, as you see."
She and her husband had planned to turn the stump into a bench, but that didn't happen.
Tom Roggow can't forget the night of the tornado. He had enjoyed the first barbecue of the season with his family. They kept an eye on the weather and went downstairs as soon as they finished eating.
"We just kind of crammed into a small framed-in bathroom," he said. "And 45 seconds later it was over."
Those 45 seconds led to three years of rebuilding.
"It's a new house in an old frame is really what it is," he said as he pointed to his fixed-up house.
Ten years ago, Tom wrote about how hard it was after the tornado.
"My mind is definitely somewhere else," he wrote. "It's not a productive day."
Now semi-retired, Tom sees the storm's silver lining every time he looks outside.
"The neighborhood is so rejuvenated and so different," he said. "The tornado in some respects kind of did the middle of town a favor."
In '98, 16-year-old Brandon Olson wrote, "We're going to take it day by day and hopefully things will get better."
He, too, huddled in the basement with his family as the tornado raced through town.
"We heard all these cracking noises, and we were covered up, and my Dad's like, 'I think the roof just flew off.' It was just unbelievable," he said.
Brandon's family spent a year packed like sardines at his grandparents'.
"Our whole family is really on edge, including me," he wrote. "We live in a small basement, and there is really no place to go to be alone."
During their year downstairs, two different contractors ripped off Brandon's family.
"Other contractors from other cities came in," recalled Brandon. "And they took advantage of people."
The Olson house looks great now, but Brandon doesn't live there. For him, the last 10 years have meant a lot of changes.
"Getting married, house, job, career, it just, it just flew by," he said.
These days he sells insurance in the Twin Cities.
"I say, 'Hey it does happen, tornadoes do come through, and tragic disasters happen,' and I try to protect people as best I can."
Clearly, Brandon's best sales pitch is his own story.
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