Last summer, two severe thunderstorms called derechos swept through South Dakota, leaving behind damage that some people are still recovering from.
Emily and Cody Stahl work a family cattle operation in Bridgewater, about 40 miles west of Sioux Falls. The farm has been in Cody’s family for five generations.
Both of last summer’s severe storms hit their place. In May, the first storm brought winds of more than 100 miles per hour.
Emily, who’s a vet, was doing relief work at the Hartford Veterinary Clinic so she waited out the storm there. Cody and their two kids were with his parents in their basement. He said it’s by God’s grace that the family wasn’t injured.
“Emily was supposed to be driving home,” he said. “My son was in front of the window - not even 1-year-old [and] being rocked by my father - that 15 minutes later was shattered and debris [was] flying through that window."
While their house was left mostly intact, they lost five barns. Cody’s parents’ house had its windows blown out and they're still cleaning up debris.
“With the derecho, apparently, it just shakes everything up and puts it where it doesn’t belong,” Emily said.
Cody was the first of the Stahl family to see the damage.
“I remember my gut just got tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter,” he said. “It was like ‘what more am I going to find?’ And you just, you kept finding things even in the days to come. It took five generations to build our family farm and in 20 minutes the infrastructure of that was gone.”
The rebuilding had to wait on insurance settlements and building materials. Cody said that turned out to be a blessing in disguise because they hadn’t started rebuilding when the second storm hit in July.
According to the Stahls, they’ve had to wait a lot this year. That’s partly because damage from the storms was so widespread that it prompted a disaster declaration for 28 counties. Despite waiting for decisions from insurance and assistance programs, Cody said he appreciated that much of their help came from local contacts.
“All of our business is local. So, our insurance company, he has ag background ties,” Cody said. “They all get it, and they are in our corner. They’ve got our back and they’re fighting for us. It’s when they have to go to the next level - the corporate level, the higher level - that then you have to wait extra-long and the correspondence drops. The local guys are doing everything they could, and they were frustrated too. They are frustrated too.”
Emily appreciated the assistance programs their family could call on.
“Sometimes I feel like with some of the USDA or FSA programs they’re there, but you have to dig for them. In this case, I thought they did a very good job of being like ‘hey, this is available; we want to help you get these funds to help you recover some,’” she said. “Because I mean, that’s the thing. It wasn’t like one day your church friends come out and help you clean up and you’re good. It’s you need to hire this neighbor to come with his bulldozer because this bar needs to go in a hole, or things like that, that cost more than just your time.”
While grateful for the assistance they received, the Stahls said it wasn't enough to make up for everything they lost.
“You could always use more help, but I’m thankful for the help we have had,” Cody said. “There could be more programs out there, but we’re able to still continue on with what we love. So, it’s enough to get us by, but we’re still bleeding. It’s not enough to make us feel secured.”
They've rebuilt everything essential to their family business. Friends helped them rebuild their hoop barn last fall and into early winter. Their shop was rebuilt right before Christmas.
Now they’re finishing up repairs. They need to put doors on every barn, bury electrical lines and make several cosmetic fixes like trim work.
“I feel very fortunate to be able to look back a year and see where we are today. Life is not normal, but life is very functional as far as we’re doing our day-to-day as what we were a year ago,” Cody said.
The Stahls are proud of how far they’ve come, but they had doubts along the way and considered leaving the farm, even though working on the family’s agriculture business is their dream.
“I think our kids made us stick it out,” Emily said. “I think if it had just been Cody and I, we would’ve been like ‘well, that’s our sign.’ But wanting to have something to give for them to continue on when we’re gone really was [why we] kind of dug our heels in and just said we’re going to find a way, we’re not giving up this soon.”
Cody and Emily both grew up farming, and they love being able to give that life to their children.
The widespread windstorms ripped through farm country and did damage in cities too, including Sioux Falls.
Roots of Brasil is a family-owned restaurant downtown. Co-owner Mark Gillespie and his partners had just opened for business about a week before the May storm forced them to close.
“It was a different opening experience than your average small business owner goes through, I would say,” Gillespie, who works as the general manager and operates the dining room, said. “It kind of hurts our honeymoon period, which every business gets.”
Roots of Brasil’s outdoor ventilation unit was torn off the building’s exterior by the wind, exposing a gas pipe. This unit is supposed to work with an interior hood vent to keep the kitchen operational, according to Gillespie.
Gillespie said the restaurant immediately had help from passersby to turn off the gas.
“There’s just a gas pipe just gushing out air or gushing out gas. So, we had to shut that off. And then, once that happens, there is no more ‘what can we do creative?’ Your kitchen’s done,” Gillespie said.
The restaurant was closed for more than three weeks while they made repairs and Gillespie believes that hurt their business. Costumers who missed social media updates showed up expecting a meal, only to find locked doors. Additionally, Gillespie thinks it dampened the excitement generated from a new restaurant.
However, Gillespie said working with family provided extra support.
“We are very close family,” he said. “So, it's a lot easier, I think, to get on the same page quicker and make the executive decisions that need to be made.”
Gillespie said the lessons he learned from the storm are still part of his life. He is ready for any similar catastrophe, like a tornado or a kitchen grease fire.
“I think it I think you have to learn from every negative in life, and certainly in business,” he said. “You can't just sit here and hope things won't happen, because it's not a perfect world and you need to be prepared.”
Both the May 12 and July 5 storms were classified as derechos by the National Weather Service. Derechos are windstorms associated with a cluster of thunderstorms that take the shape of a bow echo, according to the weather service. Criteria for derechos include being at least 400 miles long and 60 miles wide with wind speeds of at least 58 miles per hour, and embedded gusts of at least 75 miles per hour, along its track.
Weather experts said two of these storms in one summer was unexpected, so it could indicate a new pattern with more severe thunderstorms.
“In terms of any trends, it's hard to say for a variety of reasons, but certainly in the last two years it’s been more frequent than what has occurred in the past,” Thomas Galarneau, Ph.D., a research physical scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, said.
He added that two derechos within a two-month period is unusual for South Dakota.
Scientists aren’t yet sure if the possibility of an increasing number of storms is linked to climate change. The term derecho, though it was developed in the late 1800s, wasn’t widely used until the 1980s, according to Galarneau, so the data is still limited.
Galarneau said the atmospheric ingredients that are necessary for derechos to form include warm temperatures, enhanced humidity and vertical wind shear.
“Climate change may alter these ingredients in competing ways. How does climate change affect humidity? Well, there's probably going to be higher humidity. It might be warmer near the ground,” Galarneau said. “So maybe there will be warmer temperatures and higher humidity, but the vertical wind shear might change as well.”
According to Galarneau, there's some evidence the jet stream may shift north in the summer. That could change where the ingredients overlap and, thus, where derechos occur.
"It's a really complex problem that is just starting to be worked on," Galarneau said.
However, the frequency of severe weather seems to be on the rise, so Galarneau and the Sioux Falls office of the National Weather Service advise taking severe thunderstorm warnings seriously.
