Tornado — ‘There Was No Rain. There Was No Wind’
On the afternoon and early evening of July 21, the Raines family had most of Pendleton County between them. Yet both experienced two of the only tornadoes known to have touched down in the county’s recorded history.
Brett Raines, a Pendleton County Sheriff’s deputy, received a call to respond to a tornado touching down near Seneca Rocks after 7 p.m. on the day of the storms. As his wife, Danielle, recalled, “Brett had called. He was over in Seneca. He was like ‘it’s bad over here.’”
The warning from her husband to stay alert had come about 20 minutes after she saw an alert on the Weather Channel. Danielle Raines stated that “I’d gotten warnings on my phone apps all day.”
Like many who grew up in the Mountain State, she did not worry much about tornadoes prior to last week. They only struck rarely, even during tornado warnings. “When I was younger,” she shared “you’d get tornado warnings, go out in the garage and watch the storm go past” with no drama or destruction.
Tornadoes also generally come with tell-tale signs. The Ready Illinois website lists “a dark, often greenish sky” a wall cloud, especially one rotating, large hail, and “a loud roar, similar to the sound of a freight train.”
Other sites share that sometimes wind dies down to almost nothing as a tornado approaches, and that served as the ominous calm before the storm as it moved through eastern Pendleton County.
“There was no rain. There was no wind,” remembered Danielle Raines. “Then all of a sudden, it whipped through.” Deputy Raines said that “what alerted her was that a wind took everything on the front porch and threw it to the far end. That’s when she realized it was bad.”
Danielle added that “the storm blew the kitchen door open.” She took her family to the basement for safety and remembered “I was telling my kids to hold onto the pole.”
She also explained how “little things” added up to important choices that kept all safe from injury. She noted that her mother-in-law, Lori Raines, was going into the field to help with the animals but paused to feed a cat, something she rarely did. That little choice kept her from walking out into the path of the 100-mile an hour winds of the EF-1 tornado, winds that elsewhere snapped one-to-two foot wide trees in half.
The official release from the Pendleton County Office of Emergency Management underscored the random luck of the Raines family. “A heavy chicken coop and dog kennel enclosure . . . was lifted and blown over another storage structure, with debris strewn all around the yard, while the nearby house was left intact, with fallen trees all around it.”
Brett Raines shared how much “time and effort is in that house” but both he and his wife shared that even more important, no one got hurt as the storms raged through the property.
