When Alma Mosley went to bed Tuesday night, she knew the weather was supposed to get bad.

“I knew we had several warnings and watches, and I was worried,” she said.

She took her two youngest children to bed with her in their home on Seymour’s southeast side so they wouldn’t be as scared.

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Mosley said she had just fallen asleep around 5:30 a.m. when she heard “a loud boom.”

“I thought it was just lightning and thunder or maybe something had hit the side of the house from the wind,” she said Wednesday.

What she wasn’t expecting to wake up to was their aluminum carport embedded in their mobile home in the 700 block of Peak Avenue.

Having just celebrated her 41st birthday the day before, it wasn’t exactly the birthday present she had in mind.

Her husband had called into work to let them know their driveway was flooded so he wouldn’t be able to get out.

“He was awake in the living room and heard the wind picking up,” Mosley said.

After he got up to look outside to make sure their kids’ trampoline hadn’t blown away, that’s when he saw the carport lifted into the air, Mosley said.

“He hurried and shut the door, and that’s when it hit our house and went through it into the kitchen,” she said. “He came and woke me up and asked if me and the girls were OK, and I asked what the loud noise was, and he told me what had just happened.”

When she saw the damage, Mosley said she was shocked but thankful that she and her family, including their three children, weren’t injured.

The worst of the damage is inside the trailer in the kitchen, and Mosley said she is waiting for the insurance company to determine the extent of it.

“They said they can put us in a place or we could stay with family,” she said.

“You hear and see things like this happening on the news, but you never expect it to happen to you,” she added.

‘It shook the trailer’

On the west side of Seymour, at Kimberly Mobile Home Park, Jeramiah Noblitt had just arrived at home around 6 a.m. Wednesday when he heard the wind picking up outside.He was sent home from his third-shift job because his workplace had lost power, and he didn’t have power at home, either.

When he stepped outside to look at the sky, the wind blew his screen door shut, so he shut the inside door, too. Moments later, his mobile home shook.

A large chunk of a tree in front of the home broke off and landed on the south end of the home and two vehicles — a Dodge Ram 1500 truck and a 1985 Grand Marquis.

The tree landed about six feet away from where Noblitt had been standing in the doorway.

“It shook the trailer from just that hitting it,” he said of the large chunk of the tree, which stretched over near his neighbor’s yard.

Fortunately, neither he nor his fiancee were injured, and the truck most likely will be salvageable because Noblitt said it only had a dent in the roof and a cracked windshield.

The Grand Marquis, however, wasn’t as lucky. It has a large dent in the hood, and the roof and back window are crushed.

Noblitt said he had been driving the car, which originally was his grandmother’s vehicle, for a while because he was having problems with the truck.

“If we wouldn’t have gotten sent home from work, that car would be fine,” Noblitt said. “That car is probably going to the junkyard.”

Noblitt said he was glad the tree fell on the home and vehicles instead of someone.

“I’m just happy it wasn’t us,” he said.

Noblitt now has to figure out how to remove the large chunk of tree. He said it may be best to have the whole tree taken down so the rest of it doesn’t fall down.

He also said he will most likely have to replace his car.

“Well, it’s tax time, so I suppose that’s where the whole tax check is going to go,” he said.

Water also was pooled on the ground near the north end of Noblitt’s mobile home, but it wasn’t in the home. He said the only standing water he had ever seen at the mobile home park was near the main entrance off of Airport Road.

But on the south side of the mobile home park, several streets were covered with water.

‘I swore it was a tornado’

Near the entrance just in front of the office, Audrey Charles’ metal carport outside her mobile home was twisted around by the wind. That damaged the passenger-side window of a truck parked under it.Charles said that happened around 6 a.m. She was asleep at the time.

“Honestly, I swore it was a tornado coming through here with the sound of it all,” she said. “I’m not afraid of anything, and I was this morning.”

The wind also knocked over Charles’ mailbox, but she was amazed that all of the wind chimes and other items on her front porch weren’t damaged.

In the five years Charles has lived at the mobile home park and worked in the office, she said she has seen flooding worse in the area after heavy rains.

“I don’t feel the drainage ditches or the sewer lines are big enough to handle it,” she said.

No water got into any of the mobile homes, and no one was injured.

Just east of the mobile home park, at Kasting Park, wind snapped a small tree and also picked up a set of bleachers, which landed in the middle of a ball diamond.

There also was damage to a pullet building owned by Rose Acre Farms along County Road 225E west of Cortland.

Brian Stuckwisch, a supervisor for the company, said high winds ripped off about half of the roof of one of the buildings housing nearly 190,000 pullets, from baby chicks to those 15 weeks old. That building is 500 feet long and 50 feet wide.

Large sheets of the galvanized metal roof were crinkled up and strewn across a field for about a quarter-mile. The purlins, or beams, underneath the metal also were gone.

No one was inside the building at the time. Stuckwisch said typically, a handful of people work at the buildings taking care of the birds.

“(Employees) came in at 6, and it was like this when they got here,” he said. “It was pitch dark also, so they called me right away at 6 o’clock and said there was damage to the roof, and they couldn’t tell how bad it was because it was still dark.”

The other two buildings on the property weren’t damaged.

Around noon Wednesday, Stuckwisch said anywhere from 12 to 20 people had been out in the fields for six hours picking up pieces of the roof.

“We’ve probably got two dumpsters full,” he said. “It will take the rest of the day to get it all cleaned up.”

Plastic and tarps had been placed on the roof because it was still raining when the first employees arrived at the building. By early afternoon, the roof was being replaced.

A grain building and a shed at a farm west of the buildings also were damaged.

Stuckwisch said he suspects straight-line winds came through the area.

“It’s a straight line coming from the neighbor’s grain bins and buildings,” he said. “It was definitely some heavy winds.”