Make wishtv.com your home page

Clean-up efforts underway in tornado damaged areas of Montgomery Co.

MACE, Ind. (WISH) — The Crawfordsville area saw severe damage from the same storm system that later brought tornadoes to Kokomo.

Near Crawfordsville, clean up just begun Thursday afternoon.

By luck, fortune, divine intervention or whatever you want to call it, the path of a large tornado missed Meredith Manges’ house by mere feet.

“I was worried about if we had a house because we found out about it when I was bringing my wife home from the hospital,” the Mace resident said.

He and his wife were thankfully not home Wednesday afternoon when the twister swept through his property and the surrounding corn fields.

“We praise God all the time for having a house left, that’s a big blessing,” he said.

He lost three barns with farming equipment, deemed by the insurance company to be completely totaled.

But he said the most important thing is that he and his wife were not hurt.

He also feels lucky to have great friends who came out to help clean up Thursday afternoon.

“Several people from my church and friends and neighbors,” he said.

“You do what you have to do for friends and that’s why we took our church family and tried to get some of the church family out here to help,” Friend Richard VanArsdel said.

They brought manpower and valuable equipment.

“And we’re lucky we’ve got a guy that’s got that big yellow machine in our church and that helps, everybody seems to be willing,” VanArsdel said.

VanArsdel said this is just part of living in the country and being a good neighbor.

“Folks have a tendency to really pull together and work together,” VanArsdel said.

He’ll be out at the Manges farm to make sure he supports his friend.

“It means everything in the world to us,” Manges said.

The National Weather Service estimates the tornado in Crawfordsville and Mace was an EF-2.

It left a nearly six mile path of damage through Montgomery County.