Melissa Miller was buckling her daughter into the car at 5 p.m. Monday, about to drive from Miller Farms to a rock-climbing class in Westminster, when she saw the funnel cloud start to form.
Miller watched as it connected with a dust devil on the ground, turning into a fully fledged tornado, and she started repeating the same five words over and over again — as she sent her daughter, pets and other young family members down to the basement for safety, as she tried to figure out where her father, Joe, was working on a tractor and as she watched the tornado come closer.
“I was watching it and saying, ‘Don’t come to the house, don’t come to the house, don’t come to the house,’” she said.
Miller said the family-run farm counts itself lucky that the F1 tornado that touched down near Firestone just after 5 p.m. Monday and tracked 6 miles north to Platteville for 30 minutes didn’t do more damage.
The tornado stripped half of a five-acre field of peas and beets, leaving behind scraggly stems that might recover. The peas were bound for the farmers market in Longmont and Boulder this weekend, Miller said.
The tornado picked up a green John Deere combine, flipped it around and dropped it a few hundred feet away in the field, windows broken out and sides bent.
A refrigerated tractor trailer used for market sales was picked up and smashed into trees on the edge of the field. An end dump trailer used to haul seed, animal feed and manure was picked up and carried a few hundred yards into a neighboring field, back door torn off and sides bent.
“It scares me to look at it,” Miller said, looking at the trailer on its side. “I can’t believe that happened.”
Seven Weld County properties were damaged by the tornado, according to the Weld County Office of Emergency Management, including two destroyed homes and three damaged homes, resulting in more than $500,000 in loss. Officials have not finished calculating the damage to a feedlot and dairy, including a building that caught fire from a downed power line and another building lost to the tornado.
Between crop loss and equipment damage, Miller Farms is looking at tens of thousands of dollars in damages.
But Miller said she and her family are looking on the bright side — their home is unscathed, and the tornado didn’t hurt horses and cows that currently live in the same field. It missed power lines and the farm’s watering system, and there’s also been an outpouring of community support. A GoFundMe campaign at gofund.me/25287d86 has raised more than $7,500 to help with repairs.
“All the pouring out of the community just warms my heart,” Joe Miller said.
While the National Weather Service in Boulder was looking out for convection activity Monday afternoon, the office wasn’t expecting a tornado, said hydrologist Triste Huse.
“They can come up that quickly,” Huse said.
The tornado didn’t show up on the NWS radar for the first 10 minutes, Huse said, but the office sent out a tornado warning based on reports from callers.