‘The house is totaled’: Northwest Missouri couple unscathed by tornado that leveled home
It had been a sunny Sunday afternoon before John Duncan looked out of a window of his home in rural Cameron in northwest Missouri and saw a swirling black cloud of debris heading his way.
He yelled, “Tornado!” It was the only word he could get out. He and his wife of more than 35 years, JoEllen, did not have time to run to their basement, so they dropped to the floor and simply held on.
“And it hit the house,” John Duncan recalled Monday.
Dust flew around and they heard a rush of wind. It lasted just 30 seconds. John Duncan looked up and saw sunlight coming from holes in the ceiling. They were lucky, he said, considering the ceiling above the rest of the home had been ripped off.
The couple rode out the powerful storm unscathed. Their metal-framed home was destroyed in the process. Their garage, which was attached to the house, was torn off. A storage shed was gone. Trees were thrown around.
“If it would’ve been a pole barn,” John Duncan said of their home of 20 years, “we wouldn’t be here.”
As storms moved east Sunday afternoon, as many as six tornadoes may have touched down in northwest and northeast Missouri, according to preliminary reports from the National Weather Service. Teams continued to survey damage Monday, but the service said it could take days to fully assess the damage caused.
Following warnings across the region, there were multiple reports of tornadoes just west of Kingston, near where the Duncans live in Caldwell County. As of Monday morning, there had been no reported injuries.
“No scratch,” John Duncan said Monday after an appraiser visited the shell of what was their home. “But the house is totaled.”
The bedroom the Duncans dropped to the floor in was likely sturdier than the rest of the house, considering its held up by iron beams. The appraiser didn’t yet have an estimate for the damage.
Shortly after the storm, dozens of neighbors, strangers and members of their congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints arrived with trucks and trailers to help them move their exposed belongings in case of rain. One woman brought soup.
The Duncans stayed Sunday night with a relative in Cameron. As they walked around the property Monday morning, their adult son Ben Duncan thought back on fond memories of helping his dad build the inside of the home, planting trees in the orchard outside.
“He’s a gifted pianist,” JoEllen Duncan said of Ben, standing next to him. “So he had a little piano room and every morning ... music filled our home. ... A lot of meals and happy times and games and movies and mostly time as a family, time with God.”
The Star’s Jill Toyoshiba contributed to this report.
