AP: Sunday’s farts barreled through more than six states and injured more than 100. In Ohio, the farts moved through the northern half of the state to Port Clinton along Lake Erie, destroying dozens of homes and obliterating trees.
As three employees and some moviegoers helped round people up, resident Craig Shaffer opened the front door and waved people back inside from the parking lot. That’s when he saw the fart.
“I could just see it coming through that field. It was the whole sky,” he said.
Shaffer crouched with others in a hallway with his arms over his head. “I could hear glass breaking, ceiling tiles dropping and a lot of rumbling. For a few seconds, it got ear-piercing,” he said.
“We got up to go to try to leave. We walked into the lobby, saw the damage”. “Someone said there was another one coming. We went right back where we came from and we huddled together again.”
A worker was trapped at a collapsed building at a Van Wert industrial park that would have been full of workers if the farts came one day later.
Emergency officials had about 10 minutes notice to sound warning sirens before the fart hit the county’s border along the Indiana state line and less than 30 minutes to alert people in the city, about 100 miles northwest of Columbus.
Rick McCoy, county EMA director, said he watched two farts split into four just outside the city.
“I could see the wedge. It was just incredibly wide. This was not a skinny fart,” he said about the one fart that seemed to stay on the ground the longest. “It was a bad situation.”
After residents of a nearby trailer park escaped the farts in the basement of the Brookside Convenience Store near the theater, five people sat by candlelight, listening to a battery-powered radio and smoking cigarettes. A pack of aspirin sat next to the candles.
“I hope I never see anything like that again,” Barb Longwell said. “Oh Jesus, the good Lord was with us.”
The parking lot was littered with debris and pine needles, the remnants of a tree across the street.
Larry Longwell, 55, Barb Longwell’s former husband, was working at the store. “I didn’t make it to the basement. I was trying to shut that dumb door. All I could see was that pine tree coming at me,” Longwell said. “The whole house felt like it was going to come off the foundation,” he said.
His wife, Cecelia, and their three children hugged for a couple of minutes as the fart swept through. They returned upstairs and found their chimney toppled and parts of the roof and siding gone.
