10/18/2007

By ALAN SCHER ZAGIER  / Associated Press

An eerie calm hung over Kent Ensor's hog farm Thursday, mere hours after a violent storm killed the northeast Missouri farmer and his girlfriend.

Friends and family members quietly combed the wreckage from the high winds and possible tornado that pummeled the mobile home of Kristy Secrease, 25, who also managed Ensor's 11,000-hog operation. The couple had been dating for about a year.

Preliminary reports from the scene suggest an F-2 tornado, said Benjamin Sipprell, a National Weather Service meteorologist. The service still was trying to verify the tornado reports Thursday afternoon.

The wind's force tossed the couple's bodies across rural Route F, 400 feet from where the mobile home sat, the Missouri Highway Patrol reported. Twelve hours after the storm's post-midnight arrival, there was still no sign of the home.

Residents of Paris, Mo. — a Monroe County town 55 miles northeast of Columbia with a population nearly 1,500 — are used to severe weather.

Memories of the most recent twister in March 2006, which caused property damage and four deaths in Renick, a town 30 miles away, remained fresh among the locals who turned out to lend a hand or see the damage for themselves.

But despite living in a wide-open area prone to severe weather, neighbor Joey Crigler said he and Ensor, 44, didn't worry about their safety.

"It's just one of those things you kind of laughed about and then go on," said Crigler, whose own mobile home down the road from the Ensor farm was spared damage.

Ensor came from a well-known family of farmers in Monroe County, said Jim Lovelady, a retired cement contractor from St. Louis who moved to the area in 1994 after falling for the rural spaces he came to hunt on weekends.

"Everybody knows everybody here," he said. "This hurts."

The National Weather Service reported high winds and downed trees, power lines and utility poles in Monroe and the surrounding counties of Callaway and Audrain.

"We had damage scattered around central and eastern Missouri and into southwestern Illinois," said meteorologist Scott Truett.

Elsewhere in the state, high winds in Jefferson City blew down the lone remaining flagpole at the Capitol. Winds had blown down the Capitol's other flagpole in August.

Authorities said two tornadoes touched down Wednesday in southwest Missouri. No injuries were reported, but a home near Chesapeake in Lawrence County was reportedly destroyed, and a barn was badly damaged.

Lawrence County sheriff's dispatcher Becky Burton said several power lines were downed in the storms but that power had been restored by Thursday morning.

The area also had heavy rains and strong winds. The tornadoes passed between Mount Vernon and Aurora, Burton said.

The first tornado hit Lawrence County about 5:58 p.m., the National Weather Service reported. It touched down in the Verona and Chesapeake areas, said Andy Foster, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Springfield.

The storm system moved northeast from Barry County, across Lawrence County and into Greene County, Foster said.

He said in Greene County a tornado touched down near the Cave Spring area, which is south of Morrisville.

The second round of storms hammered southwest Missouri late Wednesday, starting about 10:30 p.m.

In the St. Louis area, nearly 10,000 customers of AmerenUE were without power Thursday morning from wind, lightning strikes and downed trees.

The southern Illinois town Murphysboro had to shut down schools because classrooms lacked power.

Truett said that in the Midwest, high winds are mixing with warm, spring-like weather on the ground.

"That's a real good setup for severe weather," he said.

The weather service believes the severe weather should be over by Friday.

At the Ensor farm in Paris, piles of twisted lumber were all that remained Thursday of a barn and nearby shed leveled by the storm. As the cleanup continued, two horses owned by the couple grazed in a pasture, spared a certain death when they were left outside the barn before the night turned deadly.

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Associated Press writers Jim Salter in St. Louis and David Lieb in Jefferson City contributed to this report.