Building drops on church in mystery accident
Published: May 16, 2007
This one may blow your mind.
“There was no logical explanation,” said Casey County Sheriff’s Deputy Freeman Luttrell. “I was kind of like everyone else — just awestricken.”
Luttrell was called to Pine Grove Church in the Elkhorn community last week to investigate a report that a 12-by-24-foot aluminum storage building weighing about 4,000 pounds was lifted some 30 feet into the air and dropped onto the church roof.
The mystery is that the sky that Monday afternoon was sunny and virtually clear, and the breeze had been light to calm all day.
“It was one of the prettiest days we’d had for a while,” said Juanita Long, who lives up the road about a mile. “If it had been cloudy or something, you could think, ‘Well, maybe it was a storm.’ ”
Between 2 and 3 p.m., Long heard what sounded like two loud bangs, which she at first thought might have been a traffic accident.
But when she heard no sirens, she dismissed the noise as possibly coming from farm equipment in nearby fields.
When she drove past the building a while later, she noticed damage to the church and saw guttering torn off. The metal storage building was sitting next to the church instead of 40 feet behind it.
There was a gaping hole in the church’s vinyl siding about 20 feet above the ground, and evidence that the storage building had been slammed down on the roof, about 10 feet higher.
The woman who cleans the church and her son, who was working in the churchyard, had seen nothing unusual about two hours earlier. Their vehicle had been parked where the storage building landed.
Cause remains unclear
Pastor Jeff Edwards said the locked storage building, which had a few building supplies inside, contained no explosive materials, and no suspicious residues were found by the sheriff’s office and state police.
Investigations by Texas Eastern Gas, which has lines nearby, turned up no evidence of natural gas leaks.
The National Weather Service reported no strong winds or storms in the area, and there were no broken limbs or other evidence of wind damage nearby.
“They attributed it to a gust of wind,” Edwards said. “I told people that in Acts Chapter 1, the Bible says that Jesus ascended and that the 120 were in the upper room praying. Acts Chapter 2 says the Holy Spirit came as a rushing, mighty wind, and it sealed those that were in the upper room praying.”
Interestingly, the day before the incident, church attendance had been 120, and the hole in the church wall was in the prayer room, the pastor said.
Damage has been estimated at nearly $20,000.
“The only thing I can come to terms with myself is that it was some kind of freak thing with the weather, but I don’t think a lot of people accept that,” Luttrell said. “The grass and weeds back there in the field didn’t look laid over. It (the wind) evidently came straight down out of the sky and back up.
“I think everyone wants a for-sure answer, and there isn’t one.”
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