Video courtesy of Mike King / Youtube
The co-owner of George’s Aircraft Repair in Vernon, Texas was taking cover as the tornado hit that heavily damaged the building of his business.
“We were all hiding – my family was hiding in my basement, in town,” Don Aydelott told GlobalAir.com on Monday.
Aerial footage of the twisted metal of the repair shop, with yellow Air Tractor cropdusters strewn about the grounds of the private airfield, is racking up views on YouTube.
Aydelott said nobody was inside the shop when the EF-3 tornado hit. There were no serious injuries or fatalities reported.
That doesn’t mean there weren’t rumors roaring through the tightknit town, located near the Oklahoma border, 50 miles west of Wichita Falls.
Aydelott says murmurs swirled as soon as the wind died off, claiming as many as six people were trapped in a home. The only people to get hurt, he said, were in vehicles when the tornado hit.
“People in the roads that didn’t have enough sense to get away,” he said.
Only one operational plane so far is considered a total loss, a Cessna 188 Agtruck, which has a 150-foot-long I-beam lying across it.
An insurance adjuster is to visit George’s Aircraft Repair on Friday morning.
As the business picks up planes at crash scenes and brings them back to be repaired, often sold overseas, Aydelott noted that of the roughly 16 planes on-site, in various states of repair, around a half-dozen of them were already in the middle of insurance claims from those crashes.
Has four planes he expects to still deliver to customers, after cleaning up paint damage and some minor parts replaced.
“As soon as we can clean up this mess,” he said, “we’re going to ship it to the Philipines, where it was already going anyway.”
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