Eberspacher Family Recovering Following Devastating Nebraska Tornado
Photo provided by Emily Eberspacher.
By: Brittany Bevis
The weekend of May 11, 2014 marked a major milestone for APHA youth exhibitor Emily Eberspacher. On Saturday, May 10th, she celebrated her high school graduation with close friends and family that had come into town especially for the occasion. However, on Sunday, at approximately 5 pm., the mood changed completely when a tornado hit the family farm in Beaver Crossing, Nebraska.
The tornado that hit Beaver Crossing was just one of 27 in a multi-state outbreak that spread across Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and South Dakota. Although the storms left destruction in their wake, incredibly, no deaths have been reported as of Monday. (WNCN, 2014)
Emily describes how quickly the scene changed from idyllic to terrifying in just 24 hours.
Graduation Day! Photo courtesy of Emily Eberspacher.
“It was really hot that day,” she says. “My high school graduation was actually on Saturday evening. It was a perfect night. We had just done landscaping and everything was cleaned up. Then, at five on Sunday, the tornado hit.”
“The sky was green and the clouds were moving all over. All of a sudden, the wind stopped and it was like the air was sucked out of the sky. It was bizarre.”
“It started to get nasty, and we were expecting baseball-sized hail. We decided to haul the horses into the indoor arena to camp out in there. We had five horses in stalls: one was my first mare, an old show horse of my sister’s, and two three-year-olds. None of the show horses are at home. All of those are in Texas with Suzetta Busby and Becky George. We keep roughly 14 horses at the house.”
As the weather continued to worsen, Emily and her family filled extra water buckets for the horses before gathering up everything of value in the top level of their home and heading down to their storm shelter.
“It was so scary,” she says. “All of my family and dogs were down there. The [air flow] lid in the shelter blew off and rain started coming in. It was indescribable. I wouldn’t want anybody to experience that. It was so scary and really loud.”
“When we came out, my Dad said the indoor arena was gone, and that’s where all of our horses were. It was like a knife in the gut. The part of the barn where the horses were was gone and there were three horses just standing in the outdoor arena. They had some cuts on them.”
Photo provided by Emily Eberspacher.
The only horse still left inside a stall was Emily’s three-year-old rope horse, who miraculously didn’t have a scratch on him. The remaining horses, that had been in stalls and those housed in the indoor arena, were later found running through a field.
“All of them had injuries,” she says. “We had to haul four down to the vet. Two will need surgery, but they should be fine. The vet has high hopes for them. They’re mainly traumatized a bit. We did have one miniature horse that we had to put down and one ranch horse was found dead. We found all of them that night, even the mini donkey too. My sister and I have six cow and calf pairs, and all of those are fine.”
“The indoor arena is complete gone. In the horse barn, there are at least four stalls very intact and the wash rack with one of the heaters we can still use. We’ll rebuild from there and fill in. That’s going to be our main goal.”
What remains of the horse barn. Photo provided by Emily Eberspacher.
Since Sunday, the family has been living off the use of a generator. Power was recently restored Tuesday morning. In the aftermath of the storm, Emily and her family are very thankful to the local community for helping with cleanup efforts.
“We’ve had tons of people come and help us pick up brush and branches that had been scattered, so that’s pretty much all cleaned up,” she says. “The next step is to clean up all of the tin and haul it off, and we have to dig a hole someplace on the property to burn everything.”
Even with the severe damage to their farm and the death of two animals, Emily feels very blessed that her home is intact and her family is safe.
“You can rebuild barns and buildings but at least I don’t have to visit anyone in the hospital,” she says. “I’d rather have the loss of a building than the loss of a family member.”
Although they’ve lost their indoor arena and barn, the Eberspacher family hasn’t lost their sense of humor.
“People are coming from all over Nebraska driving through,” she says. “We’ve had people ask if we are ok and what we need. My Dad says, ‘Do you like what we’ve done with the place!?’ We’re pretty positive people. My Dad said, ‘Now we can redo the things in the barn that we didn’t like!’ We’ll be ok with time; it’s not just us that have been affected by this.”
We would like to send our prayers to the Eberspacher family and all of those who have been affected by this latest round of severe weather across the U.S. The second round of cleanup at the ranch will take place tomorrow beginning at 9 am. Anyone with access to rakes, shovels, four wheelers, or small trailers for hauling away debris is welcome. Those interested in lending a helping hand may contact Emily at her Facebook page for more information.
