Kevin Clifford/Nevada Appeal Carolyn Garrett explains how her daughter's barn looked before it was suddenly devastated by a shock of wind that tore through her backyard Friday. The shock of wind destroyed one barn and caused minor damage to other structures.
The National Weather Service predicts some wild weather for today - thunderstorms, rain and strong winds - but Mother Nature's wrath hit one day early in the back yard of one Carson City resident.
No one knows when it happened exactly. Sometime between 9:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. Friday. Nobody was home at Carolyn Garrett's North Carson City house when a seemingly precise but random shock of wind tore into her yard, uprooted a 10-by-20-foot barn and caused minor damage to other structures while leaving the rest of the area completely untouched.
"It's bizarre how it picked and chose its spots," Garrett said.
Though there was a bit of siding blown off one set of stables and a piece of roofing blown off another, all three sheds or stables in Garrett's back yard were remarkably intact compared to the barn.
The barn was simply gone.
Depressions in the ground and some concrete-secured post holes show where the barn was before the Garretts left Friday morning. When they came back, the barn, or the wood that formerly belonged on the barn, was mostly in a 30-by-15-foot pen. It had apparently jumped an 8-foot-tall shed to get there.
One of the barn's four corner posts had been snapped off near its base. The others were simply pulled from the ground.
The half-dozen or so horses in Garrett's back yard seemed to enjoy the whole episode. The siding that ripped off one set of stables opened the way into a no-horse area of the yard, an area with some fresh, green grass.
According to the National Weather Service, today's thunderstorm should be accompanied with rain, so its fire hazard will likely be low.
- Contact reporter Cory McConnell at cmcconnell@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1217.
