Machine shed, barn destroyed by storm

• Barn

This nearly 100-year-old barn owned by Mark and Peggy Edlin of rural Jackson is shown after being severely damaged by strong winds accompanying Thursday’s heavy rainstorm.

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JACKSON — Mark Edlin needed the rain on his rural Jackson County farm, but he didn’t quite need 3.7 inches in the span of such a short time — and he certainly didn’t need the high winds that came with it.

Edlin was watching the thunderstorm outside his window at approximately 5:15 a.m. Thursday, but the rain, coming so fast he said it looked like five-gallon buckets of water being thrown at his house, disguised the much bigger issue happening around him under the darkened skies.

“My best guess is it could be a twister,” Edlin said of the destruction he discovered after sunrise on his farm four miles south of Jackson on U.S. 71. He first noticed a large section of roof was missing from his barn, and then peered around the farm site to find his 72- by 200-foot machine shed was flattened.

“One end wall isn’t accounted for,” he said of the machine shed. “It just blew the south wall in. The trusses are sitting on top of everything.”

As of 5 p.m. Thursday, Edlin was still waiting for an insurance adjuster to stop by and survey the damage. The machine shed was filled with farm equipment, including a tractor, grain trailer, tiling plow, a couple of balers, a backhoe, seed tender and auger. The extent of the damage to the equipment was still unknown.

“It’s a mess,” Edlin said.

“We can’t figure it out — we can’t explain it,” said Edlin, owner of Edlin Produce and Greenhouse. The greenhouses, typically filled with spring annuals and vegetables, were already empty for the season.

The Edlin farm drew a lot of traffic on Thursday, with many of their neighbors stopping in to look at the damage. Edlin said he had not heard of any other building destruction in the neighborhood, although he had heard reports of trees down on other farmsteads.

There was some hail associated with the early morning storm, but it didn’t last long and wasn’t that large. Most of Edlin’s crop damage, he said, came from the wind.

“The corn is leaning over pretty good south of my place,” he added.

Thursday’s storm wasn’t the first to do damage to the family’s farm, said Edlin, adding that high winds took out a machine shed about a decade ago.

“We’ve been through this before,” he said. “I told someone everything on this place gets built twice.”

Daily Globe Reporter Julie Buntjer may be reached at 376-7330.

The nearly 100-year-old barn did not contain livestock, and Edlin said the structure will likely be torn down. The garage, standing about 30 feet away from the house, also sustained some damage, with overhangs bent up about four inches.

“It looks like it started to suck the top of the overhang up,” Edlin said.

The house was untouched, and the trees on the property were also left standing. Perhaps most perplexing for Edlin and his wife, Peggy, were their greenhouses that sustained little to no damage.

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