On Friday, May 16, we were hit by a tornado. I grilled burgers that evening, and got everything inside just as I saw some lightning in the distance. We ate our dinner in relative peace, but shortly after finishing, we got texts from family members that a tornado was approaching. When my wife’s company sent a text to local employees to seek shelter, we did the same.
We went to our unfinished basement-garage, which was mostly one open room. We got out camping chairs. My daughter, less than a month old, started crying because she was hungry.
Not much time passed before my wife said, “The air pressure changed. Do you feel that?”
We both looked at our garage door, which now seemed so flimsy, and agreed to retreat to a small space we had in the basement with an extra cinder block wall. My wife and I both got low to the ground as I held our screaming daughter. An image popped in my head of a nearby basement window shattering. I tried to be sure my torso was hanging over my daughter, so any debris would hit me first, while I kept trying to subtly sway and comfort her.
I don’t remember the sound overhead as well as my wife does. I remember that it felt like something above us was consuming everything. I heard a crash at one point and hoped that a tree had just fallen over in the yard, but then I registered the same smell as when we were demoing the room that would become our new nursery, some kind of mix of drywall and insulation.
When the sound was gone, we stepped back out into the main room. My wife said, “Look at the garage door.” There was a dent down the middle, as if someone had creased the metal like it was a piece of paper. I could see sunlight through the new gap between our garage door and the wall.
My wife and I got into a debate over whether it was safer to stay put for a while longer or to try to get out of the house. We weren’t sure if another storm might come, if the house above us had collapsed, whether the floor above us could still collapse, whether a fire might have started, etc. We couldn’t just open the garage door anymore because of the new dent.
My wife finally said, “I have to know if our home is still there.”
She went up the stairs while I continued to try to comfort our daughter. I could hear my wife yelling to herself, but the tone wasn’t one of pain; it was of loss. So I did nothing. I just kept walking in circles and swaying my daughter and telling her we were alive.
At least one large tree had fallen on our home from the back yard. We went out the front door, but still had to fight and find our way through the limbs of the tree (or trees) now hanging over the house. Our neighbors from across the street had already started running through the yard, up the hill, to ask whether we were OK.
I drank part of a beer my neighbor brought over and we pulled a bottle of milk out of the now powerless fridge for our daughter. We had no cell service. It was clear from looking at the trees and cables and pieces of the old church on the road that we wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere for a while. The sun was shining.
People kept walking up and down the road. Even the neighbors we never talk to knew we had a baby and were relieved to learn she was alright. One of our neighbors kept driving around in a workhorse, telling people what to do and giving short rides to people we had never seen before.
An hour or so later, when a team of volunteers had finished removing pieces of the old church from the road, the police could start to pull in their cars. They parked in front of our home. Our neighbor in the workhorse drove up and asked them to pull off to the side. He told them, “You don’t own the fucking road, you know.”
We were able to drive one town over to stay with family. We called Allstate that same night to inform them of the damages.
We were very fortunate that it had been a dry tornado, and that there was no rain in the forecast until Monday. We scrambled over the weekend without cell service to coordinate between a tree service and our general contractor to get the roof cleared and tarped. Our contractor spent close to 8 hours navigating the missing roof decking and broken boards to tarp 90% of our roof by Sunday night.
We had survived a tornado and thought we had secured our home from additional, catastrophic damage before a thunderstorm rolled in at the beginning of the next week. I felt extremely fortunate and grateful to be alive. I didn’t mind the gas powered generator running all day, blurring sounds like a white noise machine; the constant smell of smoke as neighbors began piling up the top halves of all their dead trees and setting them on fire; sleeping at the house at night, prepared for looters.
But our struggle with Allstate had barely begun.
Allstate told us the earliest they could have an inspector visit us to start the adjustment process was Thursday, May 22 — 6 days after the tornado. We found this a little disappointing. Some of our neighbors got initial appointments by Monday and Tuesday, May 19th and 20th. Both had different insurance companies than us. Before Allstate would attempt to send one person to our home with a smartphone to take pictures, we had removed the trees and tarped our roof; had a team of family, friends, and church members help start to break down and organize the trees coating our yard; we had identified and had a gas leak fixed across three different visits from the gas company; we had coordinated the REMC, an electrician, and a county inspector to visit and restore electricity individually to our home; and we had a contractor visit our house to start the process of quoting a new roof and assessing additional damage.
We got our general contractor to agree to be at our house when the Allstate inspector came on Thursday. He was doing us a favor. He had a friend with him, because they were driving to Indianapolis immediately afterwards for Memorial Day weekend and the Indianapolis 500.
We had no idea what to expect from the Allstate inspector that day. He called my wife 30 minutes beforehand to ask whether it was raining and told us that he would not get paid if it was raining. Allstate wouldn’t let him get on the roof, and they wouldn’t pay him if the inspection wasn’t completed. We told him it wasn’t raining.
When the inspector arrived, he got out of his car and said, “Did you guys get hit by a tornado? I thought so. Allstate barely tells us anything.” I noticed he was not wearing any clothes that indicated he worked for Allstate. This was when we learned that Allstate contracts out initial inspections, rather than send their own employees or the actual adjuster.
The inspector asked if he could borrow our drill. He didn’t bring tools to re-tarp the roof. He said he normally didn’t see homes with this much damage — he typically just had to remove and put back on one or two tarps to take pictures of a couple missing shingles. But he was confident he could do it because he used to install roofs and he only had to take about 80% of one section off at a time to take the picture and then he could put it back on before moving on. Our general contractor had an incredulous look on his face.
I felt like my heart was in my throat. We thought we were in good hands, but this nice, well meaning guy seemed in over his head. There was rain in the forecast for the afternoon. We had our contractor with a team of two spend an entire Sunday diligently adding boards and tarps to our home so it could survive a thunderstorm. Now someone who looked like he was less than 30 years old was telling us he needed to undo and redo that work by himself, with some tools that he borrowed from us.
And why would Allstate send this guy without telling him a tornado went down our road?
The inspector eventually said he had driven through rain on the way to our house. It seemed he was starting to second guess himself. He tried to call Allstate and his own boss at his own company to see if he could get away with just using the hundreds of photos we and our general contractor had taken. Allstate wouldn’t relent. They wanted the tarps down and pictures taken from his phone.
The inspector finally said he knew he couldn’t do the work that needed to be done that day without risk of significant additional damage. He said he couldn’t be back until Monday or Tuesday, and that he’d feel awful making us wait so long after what we’d already been through and how long we’d already waited. He was able to get his coworker to agree to come to our house around 11:00 am the next morning. We were able to get our contractor to agree to have his employee come to our house at the same time, to help the inspector re-tarp the roof and ensure he did an adequate job. We were warned by Thursday’s inspector that the inspector on Friday also did not have a drill, and would need to borrow our tools.
Friday morning came. Our contractor showed up just a bit early. We heard no word from the inspector. My wife tried to call and text him with no response. About an hour after the appointment was supposed to start, he texted my wife that he would not be there today and that Allstate would call us.
Someone from Allstate did promptly call us to let us know an inspector from a different third-party contracted company had already been scheduled to arrive on Sunday between 8:00 and 11:00 am. This would be 9 days after we had been hit by the tornado.
In the meantime, we were able to get a second contractor to visit us to assess damages and start the quote process once Allstate was ready. We got an HVAC company to our home to work on our furnace that was now cycling and who told us it was likely toast because of the tornado. He got in our attic and noticed the exhaust for our water heater was now just emptying into the attic because the storm had ripped out the piping, but that he wasn’t too worried about it since there was a giant hole in the roof anyway.
A coalition of the Amish, Mennonite, and Church of the Brethren sent an army of children with chainsaws and a Bobcat to help clean up our property. We had to tell them not to clean up piles directly in front of or behind the house, because Allstate still had not sent one person with a smartphone capable of taking pictures of it that we had already taken.
On Friday evening and Saturday morning, my wife got a couple calls from Allstate that we found strange. Someone tried to schedule an inspector appointment with us. On Friday, we told the Allstate representative that we had an appointment set-up for Sunday morning already, and that person agreed he or she could see it in their system. We asked the Saturday caller the same thing, but that person put us on hold for 5 to 10 minutes until the call was ultimately disconnected. Saturday evening, my wife called the contracted inspection company directly to confirm they were coming, and they said Allstate never sent them the appointment request. They would not be able to make it.
9 days have passed since the tornado, and we do not know when Allstate will start the inspection process. We do not know if the tarps will hold against the coming rain and if our home will still ultimately be destroyed. The storm came and went. Our dealings with Allstate haven’t even begun.