CLINTONVILLE, Ky. (LEX 18) — At 9:24 a.m. on Tuesday, Amy Boone was on the back porch taking pictures of the sky. At 9:32 a.m., she emerged from the basement of her Bourbon County home to assess the tornado damage.
“Every single bit of this, from the calm before the storm to after the storm was eight minutes,” she said from her heavily damaged backyard the next morning.
Amy didn’t know it was a tornado that ripped across the area. Truth be told, neither did we when we spoke at 9:30 in the morning. The National Weather Service made the preliminary determination at around noon Wednesday. Clintonville sits just five or six miles from downtown Paris.
The damage to Amy’s home includes broken tree limbs, downed trees, a collapsed fence that will have to be replaced, some siding shingles that were blown off the home, and anything that was on the patio is either in the pool or on its side somewhere in the yard. But the biggest hint that this might have been a tornado came from Amy’s description of what happened to the large play structure that was here until Tuesday morning.
“This was huge,” she said, describing the Pirate ship play set. "It was probably, if I remember correctly, 15 feet tall and 20 feet long, and I literally watched it twirl right down that hill.”
It eventually split into several pieces, but no one was hit by the debris. Everything else is replaceable and, she said, more than likely covered by her homeowner's insurance policy.
“I’m good, the kids are good and we’ll replace it, or we won’t. It’s just stuff,” she said.
When informed hours later that it was, in fact, a tornado, she said, “We’re blessed.”
It was eight minutes she won’t soon forget.
“I know whole the back of the house is all glass, so I didn’t know what we were going to walk into,” she said about the moment after leaving their shelter in the basement.
“Nobody was hurt,” she said, “thank goodness!”
