Melrose cleans up after tornado crumples buildings, scatters debris

As Mark Stanley drove up to Melrose Metalworks on Saturday night, the first thing he noticed was the parade of people driving by — wide-eyed and in awe as they took in the damage.

Then he saw it himself: One of the machine shop company’s nine buildings was still standing but without three of its walls or its roof — remnants from the tornado that touched down in western Stearns County on Saturday night.

“Mother Nature is a powerful woman,” said Stanley, vice president at Melrose Metalworks. “It was traumatic to see all the pieces of sheet metal wrinkled up and thrown in a ball all 360 degrees around the building. It wasn’t straight-line winds. It definitely had a swirl to it.”

The National Weather Service on Sunday reported the tornado, which it classified as EF1, among the weakest of tornadoes with a wind speed of between 86 and 110 mph, emerged out of a supercell thunderstorm that was rotating in the area around 8:10 p.m. The 4-mile path began outside of Melrose — a city of 3,600 people about 35 miles west of St. Cloud — where it damaged farms and businesses, reaching maximum winds of 95 miles per hour. The storm also produced hail up to 3 inches in diameter that fell in central Minnesota.

“Thank God nobody got hurt. We can replace things,” Stanley said, adding the company was back to work by Monday morning. “The part that makes you understand how great human nature is — 90 percent of our employees showed up Sunday morning and we cleaned up.”

Melrose Mayor Joe Finken said Monday no one checked into any area hospitals for injuries, something he said was “pretty impressive for the damage we did have.”

The bulk of the damage, Finken said, was on the outskirts of town, where a few houses were left with crumpled garages and damaged roofs. The Red Cross showed up Sunday to help a few displaced families. Finken also estimates a few hundred trees were knocked down.

A turkey barn south of town was also battered by the storm.

“It’s still standing but it’s pretty much destroyed,” Finken said. “It lifted the middle of the building up. I’ve never seen nothing like that.”

For the most part, things returned to normal fairly quickly after the storm. The water tower, which went offline for a bit, was up and running by midnight and power was restored for most residents by 1:30 a.m. Sunday, Finken said.

Cleanup began early Sunday morning and by early afternoon all the streets were reopened.

“We did have our sweepers going through just so we could get through to areas where there were possible nails and stuff,” Finken said. “We have gawkers so we wanted to make sure we didn’t get too many flat tires for people.”

Finken echoed Stanley’s thoughts on how the storm and its aftermath highlight how people pull together in times of need.

“There were people coming to help other people who I didn’t even know. In Melrose, you pretty much know everybody,” he said. “We definitely had neighbors helping each other out.”