TWIN LAKE, Mich. — A Twin Lake mobile home community is unrecognizable after Tuesday's severe storm. Those who live there are rallying together to rebuild.
“I’ve never been in a tornado, so I’m told, but I definitely believe it was something other than straight winds that came through our area," said Shawn Challinor, field operations manager at Timberline Estates.
Officially, it was 70-mile-an-hour straight-line winds that caused the catastrophe.
"The trees were swirling instead of swaying," said Makenna Hagstrom, who's lived there with her boyfriend for three years.
“For three minutes, it was complete silence; you could’ve heard a mouse fart. That’s how quiet it was," Challinor said.
“It terrified me," said Kaleigh Banner, a resident for nine and a half years. "We’ve never had anything like this happen here since we moved in.”
For much of Tuesday, massive downed trees prevented people from getting in or out of Timberline Estates.
“Just complete destruction," Challinor said. "Complete destruction.”
Challinor gave FOX 17 a tour of the damage Wednesday morning. Every home we drove by came with its own narrative.
“Right across the street, her neighbor's house here — 100% loss," he said, pointing out a home crushed by a tree.
There are 302 sites in the community, 215 of which are occupied. Challinor says eight of them are unlivable, with dozens more experiencing some level of damage.
Many people were inside their homes when the storm ripped through. Hagstrom's boyfriend pulled one woman to safety.
“He had went over there because there was a woman screaming for help and there was a tree that fell, like, literally onto her bed," she explained. “She thanked Tyler and said that he was her hero.”
“That’s right where she was sleeping at," Challinor said on the tour. "[Her] pillow was on the other side of that tree.”
Hagstrom's brand-new car was not as fortunate.
“I wanted to go check on my car and we went and looked out the front window and both of our vehicles had a whole tree laying across it," Hagstrom said.
She said it was considered totaled then towed away Wednesday morning.
Over by the duplexes, where an additional 86 sites are located, you can see even more damage.
“We got a live wire that’s still down from the main power lines," Challinor said. "Complete fire in the playground all night long.”
In total, Challinor said more than 100 trees on their property toppled over, blocking cars and crashing into mobile homes.
"These were all healthy trees that were uprooted," Banner said. "Nothing that was dead, they were just taken out.”
“The tree the was over my car was across the road right here," Hagstrom showed FOX 17.
What was once impassable is now a symbol of strength and hope. Hagstrom's family joined a team of others taking it upon themselves and using chainsaws to clear debris.
Challinor guessed the repairs will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Months of work," he said. "Months and months.”
Everyone's timeline will be different, but as Hagstrom explained, no one will go through it alone.
“We weren’t the only people that were affected by it," she said. "I knew that a lot of other people had it worse than I did. I wanted to help them.”
Challinor said the community's lift stations and wells are both running on generators, so some people can still get hot water as long as their home has gas. However, the power is out and will remain out until Thursday at noon at the earliest, according to the Consumers Energy outage map.
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