One more house was demolished in St. Peter. It was old...built in the 1860's...and in need of restoration, but still, it was someone's home until the March 29th tornado. MPR's Lynette Nyman interviews the owner, Tom Gravelin, as she follows him through the recovery. His business is back up...while his home has finally come down.
Frequently referred to as the 1998 Comfrey–St. Peter tornado outbreak, 14 tornadoes (including an F3 & F4) wrought destruction in southern Minnesota on March 29, 1998. More than 3,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed by the tornadoes. The towns of St. Peter and Comfrey were utterly devastated. Storms left two people dead and dozens injured.
Transcripts
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LYNETTE NYMAN: Where's Tom? That's been the question lately. He moved into his FEMA trailer several weeks ago, and he hasn't been around much since then. Well, he's there, but not in the trailer, tucked away behind closed shades in a room just off the cafe he co-owns.
Tom Gravlin has been working on the plans for his new house. At the same time, he's been waiting for his name to come up on the city's demolition list. You didn't last very long in that FEMA trailer.
TOM GRAVLIN: I haven't, I haven't. I needed to be out of the FEMA trailer so that I could sit in front of a computer for many hours a day while I was designing the new house. And the FEMA trailer is not conducive to freedom of thought or movement or anything.
It's nice. The air conditioning finally is working in the FEMA trailer and I will be spending more and more time there.
LYNETTE NYMAN: The plans for the new house are, let's say, ambitious. A contractor would probably say it's a several hundred thousand dollars job at least. Describe it for me.
TOM GRAVLIN: Two story, basic cube, it's a big cube with a tower in the front, porches in the front, and some porches on the South side of the house. The house faces East.
The South side is the major part of the yard, and of course, the sunny side of the house. So the porches will serve a few purposes, one of which will be to keep some of the direct sunlight out of the house and keep it a little cooler, and another will be to afford a place to sit and watch the world go by.
It's ambitious. Foolish, perhaps. It will be a healthy-sized house. I'm thinking of perhaps putting out word among the theater community and seeing if I can round up a bunch of tech theater people because it'll be a theater kind of house, just for fun. And maybe get some of my friends to come down and help build.
LYNETTE NYMAN: Why so ambitious?
TOM GRAVLIN: How often does one get the chance to do something like that? Not very. I wake up in the middle of the night with some fantastically good idea of how to save hours and hours doing some part of it. I think I'm still excited when it's in the planning stages.
We can plan anything you want. Oh, what fun, let's build a castle, let's build a moat around it. And let's build a water gardens and that's good. The imagination needs to do that.
But as the actual labor of it becomes something that I'm going to have to begin doing in a few weeks, I hope. Some of those wildly fantastic, broad scale plans get narrowed down a little bit.
LYNETTE NYMAN: The two of us sat on a concrete slab attached to the house. Ants crawled over our feet. Mosquitoes got their fill while we waited for the demolition crew stuck on the other side of town.
TOM GRAVLIN: They were going to have come last week, but I discovered that the gas company hadn't turned the gas line off yet, which probably would have made for a very fast demolition, but perhaps not the way they would have chosen to do it. So we canceled that.
And then there's some other problems, and they ran into some difficulty with a house down the street that the water line hadn't been completely turned off, and there was a nice spray of water, I guess. And I'll believe it when I see it. When they get here with the big machinery, then I'll be excited and a little sad.
Even if it's a house that needed a lot of work and gave me a lot of bruised knuckles and sore backs, still it's sad to see your house, your home come down a mess, but it's my home.
LYNETTE NYMAN: The demolition crew eventually turns up the next morning. It's two men, a dump truck, and a 64,000 pounds backhoe looking like a hydraulic tyrannosaurus with really big teeth. It chomps, chomps, chomps delicately, gracefully, and powerfully until what's left is only what you want. Tom Gravlin watched carefully as the timbers snapped and the walls became rubble.
TOM GRAVLIN: It's amazing how sturdy the house actually was, watching some of the walls come down, and the walls were coming down in 20 foot long sections, or 24 foot however long the old 2 by 4 studs were. No wonder the thing stood up and I survived it.
LYNETTE NYMAN: Now the real work starts, building the foundation, putting up the frame, and keeping fingers crossed. I'm Lynette Nyman, Minnesota Public Radio, Saint Peter.