LINWOOD, Kan. — It may be easy to get complacent about severe weather in the midwest, but emergency management experts say conditions can quickly turn dangerous without forewarning.
Trent Pittman, with Johnson County, Kansas, Emergency Management, says the tornado that happened on June 8 last year inspired a lot of change and reflection within the department.
“We’ve updated all of our SOGs and plans and policies that we have in place,” Pittman said. “It was definitely eye-opening to see a lot of the vegetative damage and a lot of the structural damage that occurred, you know, following that event."
Pittman’s advice to homeowners is to prepare three things: an emergency kit, an automated method to receive severe weather information and a bunker to shelter-in-place.
“I can’t think of nothing that's more important than knowing where you’ll seek shelter for severe weather, for tornadoes," Pittman said. "You know, lowest level of your home, most interior room if you don’t have a basement and minimizing a number of windows to the maximum extent."
KSHB 41 checked back in with a Linwood family that was impacted by a tornado on May 28, 2019. Four years later, the McLaren’s say they are still picking up the pieces.
“It’s definitely a process I would say. Rebuilding is the hard part,” Aaron McLaren said. “You don’t really have time to process it because you’re always trying to get to the next thing, you know? Like, what do we need to do next, or insurance in coming out, or we need to be out here for this or that, and clean up and then what are we going to salvage or what we’re not going to salvage.”
The left, front side of the house where the garages were completely ripped off and the back of the house blew out.
Even after all this time, McLaren says he still finds rubble from the tornado around his yard.
The family was displaced to a hotel in Legends for about a month before a rental house big enough to accept the family became available.
It took two years to build a house from the ground up.
“It was kind of devastating to see just the mass destruction of how fast it happened, you know?” McLaren said. “Just record every room, cause then when your insurance adjuster comes right, you can go back to that video and say, 'Hey, I had that router. Hey, I had that printer, I had these four chairs in that room.'”
It has been two years since the family moved into their brand new home and they have welcomed two new babies to the family since.
While they grieve the loss of what was, they are finding the joys in what is to come.
“Obviously the kids making memories every year it makes it feel more like home,” McLaren said.
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