SF Neighborhood Picks Up What Storm Left Behind

SIOUX FALLS, SD - At least three families in southwestern Sioux Falls are staying somewhere else Friday night after a severe storm ripped through their neighborhood early Friday morning.

The National Weather Service says a storm that hit near 48th Street and Ellis Road overnight packed two 100 mile per hour microbursts, which were equivalent to an EF-1 tornado. 

Ted Poncelet's garage may be gone, but it's going to take a long time before his memory of the early morning storm will be tossed aside. 

"We heard it rain a little bit, then all of a sudden we heard a loud bang, like a shotgun went off," Poncelet said.

Workers were putting a tarp over the roof of Poncelet's home Friday. It was torn off around 2:45 a.m. when a microburst hit the home. The strange storm knocked over Poncelet's camper, but left another nearby camper untouched. 

"Amazing how it can hit one thing and not the other," Poncelet said.

Poncelet's house wasn't the only one hit, two homes less than a block away also had collapsed garages and debris spread everywhere. 

A large chunk of roof, a piece of siding, and even a baseball card sat more than 200 feet away from the backyards of the neighborhood Friday. It's the destruction mother nature left behind and evidence of the long clean up that lies ahead.

"It's a huge process. Each job, each house is different. Each house has a different problem. Some of them you don't have to do anything inside, the garage was just destroyed, some of them the roofs are off and you've got to just totally take all the contents out," Jerry Berg with Intek Cleaning and Restoration said.

Intek Cleaning and Restoration is working to clean up four of the homes that were hit.

"We have probably six or eight dump trailers to the landfill to help expedite the clean up to the garage so its not blowing around all weekend or wet in the next rain," Berg said.

Neighbors are also lending a helping hand, something Poncelet is thankful for after mother nature left her fingerprints on his home.

"You say hi to them during the day, and then they come and do this and you don't know them but they're your neighbors and that's great," Poncelet said.

A silver lining in a storm that scattered homes and lives in a southwest Sioux Falls neighborhood.