Chad LeJeune evacuated his family for Hurricane Laura, but he stayed behind to weather the storm at home in Iowa. He estimates being in an interior room of his house for five hours as the wind from the Category Four hurricane whipped by.
"You have to be scared because if you call someone, no one is coming," said LeJeune. "It wasn't a howling. It was more like a screaming. You could actually hear the shingles being ripped off the house. It almost sounded like someone very heavy walking on your roof."
He stayed because he wanted to be nearby his home so he could patch up whatever damage he had immediately. Unfortunately, he was the bearer of bad news to others in his neighborhood whose home collapsed or whose 40-foot RV flipped over.
"I would probably stay up to a Category Three. I would not do a four again," he said.
Jade Miller left his home in Bell City after days of prep for the storm.
"My roof is almost a disaster. A lot of the plywood is showing. It blew in the back door of my house so when it rained a lot of the wood floors and walls got rained on. My brother across the street has no home to come back to," explained Miller.
I asked him where, because I didn't see anything. You see that elevated surface, you see that slab? That's where he lived. He had a mobile home on that slab and it's gone. It rolled off the back of the slab and landed behind there. Just the devastation they're coming back to. I'm looking at his shower door. His bed that's broken. His clothes. His shampoo. There's some sort of alarm that's going off. Just a horrendous thing for someone to come home to. How do you start over from something like this?
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