LeeBottom Airport damaged by tornado

[Nathan K. Hammond]

Reports are coming in slow; but LeeBottom took one on the chin. Took the roof off the house, hangar, and shop. Ginger and the animals are all okay, Rich is on his way home from NYC. If you enjoyed any of his flyins or Sunday ice cream days, nows a good time to pay it forward/back. They can use some help getting everything coved and protected.

I'm heading out in the morning with tools, chainsaw, generator, trailer and 4wheeler. Seeya there.

nkh

[Holcombe]

Pay it forward.
That's something we all need to do a lot more of. Fix what we can fix, live with what we can't, and not ask the government, or "others", for stuff we don't want to pay for.

[james gevay]

I was wondering about them, I knew they were probably somewhere near the tornado area in southern Indiana.
I'm glad that everyone is OK.

[Nathan K. Hammond]

Lee Bottom was EXTREMELY lucky! The tornado had them dead to rights; the only saving grace was it's location in the river bottom. When the tornado crested the hill, it had enough forward momentum to carry it over the runway and just clip the hangar and house before setting down on the road and field across the street. Damage was still fairly bad. Took off one of the hangar doors; that was chained and pinned, removed the roof, and two walls of the shop, destroyed the carport/cover that sits in front of the house, which then flew into the house taking out part of the roof.

On saturday, we were able to remove the collapsed roof and walls off the shop, put some tin back onto the hangar, cut up and start removing the trees around the house, and start the general clean up and moving everything to safe storage. Rich has been going at it everyday since, and I expect he'll setup a couple work days to get things back in order. All the fly-in supplies were in the shop; so they're either water damaged, spread across the field, across the river in Kentucky or plain gone.

There's been a bunch of great people come through and help out, and we can't thank them enough.

nkh

[joea]

Nathan,

I have been following this since it happened and Rich posted on Facebook that he was heading home to help Ginger.

Is there any sort of donation or fund we can help with? Being 2000 miles away some of us cannot come over to help, but would still like to assist.

Joe