#89 Hit by a tornado! Tornado destruction, scariest ride of our lives!

Well, welcome back everybody. As uh you just seen from that intro we had quite an experience yesterday. I don't even uh I don't even really know where to begin. Obviously you can tell this isn't clickbait. Not something you usually expect in Florida. Tornadoes and uh first and foremost without a doubt I want to say we're both thankful and we thank God that we're okay. We walked away without a single scratch. So let's give credit where it's due. All these things behind us can be replaced and uh that's what we will do. But um we had a rough ride yesterday. We were here when it happened. I was in that camper back there asleep for work and uh Tiffany had just got home from work was unloading some groceries out here in the shop behind us. We got a little message on the phone that said you know mine just said tornado warning woke me up. Okay well we we get those from time to time with thunderstorms. She got a much more detailed message than my phone did so I just kind of put it down went back to bed. She called me I don't know one to two minutes later and her said that there's a tornado spotted in the area. Told me to grab our little dog get out to the building. Well being the stubborn man I am I kind of played it off. I'll be okay. I'm dead tired. Been working shift work. Only been to bed a couple hours. No sooner and I put my phone down it was already too late. I don't think I could have got out anyways. The wind just went from crazy and concerning to unreal in a matter of seconds. I have never been in anything like that in my life. The sounds, the craziness. We have a little windy unit in the bedroom. It was blowing water straight in on me like you had a water hose. So all I could do was talk to her on the phone as we're basically telling each other that we we love each other because we don't we don't know what's about to happen and trying to hold back the water. Next thing I know the wind gets so intense so crazy that the whole pole barn took off. I didn't even know what happened. It hit the side of the camper. The camper tried to flip over but luckily because we're in a hurricane state I have put mobile home anchors in the ground years ago and I have the camper cabled to the ground. That's the only thing that kept it from flipping over and coming out in the yard with me and our little dog in it. It definitely tried to but those anchors did their job so thank God those were in the ground. So we made it out again. Thank the good lord we're okay. No scratches no nothing. You know I got to thinking about it a minute ago if we'd have just even got a scratch or needed stitches out of this now's not the time that you even want to be in a hospital. So uh we couldn't ask for any more so I don't know if you have anything you want to say but no we're just blessed so blessed and it was one of the scariest moments of my life because that's kind of one of my fears is a tornado and now to experience it. For some reason she's always had a fear of it and when you're in Florida you don't really think much about tornadoes and don't get me wrong we get them when we're actually in tornado alley if you look it up but we get a lot little quick small tornadoes just with severe thunderstorms that come through but uh y'all y'all keep us in your prayers but more importantly keep everybody else in this area in your prayers because we had two tornadoes touched down just in this county alone yesterday and one touched down just a few miles east of us went across a major interstate and looking at the pictures there it's crazy there's just big trees standing completely stripped of leaves nothing left farms have been demolished chicken houses so this it looks wild over there looks like the stuff you kind of see out west so we had a couple tornadoes come right through here I think we may have got the smaller one thank goodness but people just a few miles down the road got what looks like a more intense one so keep those people in your prayers if you would thanks for watching so y'all uh we don't really have a heater right now obviously so got a little fire going because believe it or not this was a cold front and it's dropped 15 plus degrees it's in the 40s so it's kind of chilly out here figure I'd start a little fire but kind of walk y'all around and show you the damage and I'm gonna go ahead and let y'all know I'm probably gonna have family and friends helping me that and thank y'all for all that a lot of people have reached out it's just kind of been overwhelming um so I'm probably not going to do a whole lot of recording I'm gonna inspect some people's privacy I may just do a bunch of time lapse on repairing some of this but here's what's left of my basically brand new four-year-old pole barn 30 by 60 was just rag tossed kind of wild and crazy you know if you just watch the video you've seen I just built my uh chip dump cart there it's completely destroyed and look at this this is wild my mowers flipped completely upside down I think that thing weighs close to a thousand pounds my brand new wood chipper has been rag tossed it's got a decent amount of damage the chutes damage some of the sheet metal I think it's going to be okay that thing's pretty heavy duty build I'm just going to bend some of that back out you can see here's what's left of a lot of the pole barns uh post some of them are stripped I was in that camper yesterday when this thing hit and that pole where it's at all I did was lift it up put the tarp put it back but it actually went through the roof there it's got the uh camper structure bent all up in there it destroyed the uh that's in our bedroom so that's right where I was at it destroyed the uh what do you call that the closets in there all that wood's damaged there's about a softball size hole through the camper it cut the roof open up there um so the camper's got some damage it shoved it over into my mower over there so there's holes all on the side of the camper so I don't know what's going to happen there we got insurance claims adjuster going to come out at some point something uh I can say I'm no engineer and I don't build stuff for a living but I can tell you one thing I'm extremely upset about is uh the person that I had put this pole barn up you can see where some of the cause of failure was here he put the post in the blocks just like I asked but I can clearly see that he did not put rebar through the post which I also clearly asked for and I know y'all probably saying hey go after this person this that and the other but um explain to you all the way things work in Florida if you do an agricultural barn which this one was you don't pull permits or do anything you don't have to if it's for tractor equipment and all and storage um you know I have no permits I have nothing signed off there's probably zero liability here that I can go after but I can tell you the next one that gets built the posts are going to go in the ground much deeper than what I see and they will have rebar through the post so they hold into the concrete would it have made a difference I really don't know it busted the concrete completely up some of the posts flipped out so far that the concrete is still out there in the yard a hundred yards away so I really don't know if it would have mattered but I can see that it wasn't built the way that I requested so you can see where all the posts used to be we're we're fortunate we didn't get as much damage as uh as we could have my motor's been banged all up I'm going to have to claim that there's quite a few things bent there I think it'll be okay but we're going to get some of that replaced like I said the camper's uh kind of trashed on the inside we got a lot of water in it because whenever that post come through it was just pouring water in that bedroom so uh I don't know we're going to see what the claims adjuster says there and what tried to flip the whole camper camper has been moved several feet this way used to be up on those blocks but mainly what flipped it not only was it the wind but I don't know if you could see all those indentations there there and here so when the whole barn went and ripped all those six by six posts came flying that's what smacked the camper off so the only reason this camper did not go is because I've got these anchors deep into the ground these are like four foot anchors I call them mobile home anchors they're not but they're deep earth augers you can see I got heavy duty cable and this goes over the frame of the camper and I've got six total that is the only reason I think I'm here talking to y'all safe there's no doubt in my mind with the ride that I took in this camper that uh it would be flipped over and rolled out there in the yard you see where it shoved the camper into one of the pieces of farm equipment so I'm gonna have to rip that apart to get it out rip water hoses out rip my wiring all out of the ground this is the post where you see where plumbing used to be I've got to try to repair all this today to get this camper back up and going and patch the roof on it check this out this post did not come out that way it was thrown and shoved through there just crazy this is what I was talking about look there's some more of the concrete all the way out here this is what was holding those posts in the ground like I just don't even begin to understand how huge chunks of concrete get thrown all the way out here lord there's more over here and look where stuff just hit the ground so this is crazy there's more of that concrete that's holding the post in and look how far away I am got trash and stuff everywhere to pick up I mean the woods are just littered just destroyed buckets and there's metal out there drums look here you can see where it just threw one bucket through the trees so hard busted it to a hundred pieces I see some way out there stuff all out in the woods wow that's just crazy all right well first priority need to get this plumbing fixed since I gotta let glue set up and if you're wondering about the wires I've done killed the breakers that's one of the first things I did yesterday since I've got live wires out here on the ground I'm not trying to electrocute nobody luckily for me I just purchased that 4x4 to try to finish the garden so I've got some of the things that I need without having to go run around y'all ever seen the movie twister I thought all that crap was make-believe and I could tell you some of those sounds in that movie that I thought wasn't real that's real I heard them yesterday oh good yeah were they hanging on to the pipes with their belts yeah we weren't hanging out here with belts on the pipes no but I was thinking do I need to oh mighty interesting all right I dug my breaker box out from underneath the pole barn tried to fix a bunch of it it was tore up pretty good I think I got it where it'll work all right well I know I skipped a few steps but I've got my breaker box in I've got my plumbing hook back up so now we can actually use the camper so I've just got to patch the roof and do a few other things and then uh it's livable again so due to kind of respecting everybody that's coming over right now I've had some friends and family come out of the woodwork I really appreciate them coming over and helping out even though I've told them not to they just won't have it any other way they're coming so I'm probably not going to record much I'm going to put it in a time-lapse mode show us taking some things apart and then uh my next video tomorrow or the next day kind of be you know a little more intimate be just me talking and doing some things and I'll go back to doing my normal recording so thank you all so much for watching like I said I'm about to kick it in time-lapse mode here a little bit of music you can show us tackling this thing