The stormy weather that blew through much of the Missouri Ozarks on Saturday night was responsible for destroying at least one structure in Texas County.
A 50 X 100-foot steel barn on cattle farm property owned by Darren Scheets off of Highway 137 in Yukon was left in ruins after being torn apart by high winds.
Scheets and his son, Jake Scheets, discovered the situation when they took a load of cattle to the location at about 11:30 p.m.
“We saw the white from the metal roof over to the left of where the barn had been,” Jake said, “and then were like, ‘there’s no barn.’ ”
Evidence at the scene suggests the air movement was rotational rather than straight-line, because dislodged and displaced objects had been moved in different directions from where they originated, and the branches of a nearby tree were clearly twisted.
“I’m pretty sure this wasn’t from straight line wind,” Darren said.
Several large blocks of concrete that vertical steel girders had been attached to were ripped from the ground and moved as much as 200 feet, and more than a dozen metal gates from the complex lay mangled here and there, far from where they originated. One flew about 300 feet before landing near a fence line.
“There was a lot of power involved,” Darren said.
Darren’s brother, Darrell Scheets, said that based on what he saw happening at his nearby property, the calamity likely took place at about 5:40 p.m.
Incredibly, stacks of square bales of hay that had been inside the 10-year-old barn were completely intact, and an adjacent cattle chute and other items were left undamaged.
“I’m just glad nobody was there,” Darren said, “because this would have been a different story.”
