We have another story to share with you from the “Minneapolis Police 150th Anniversary” book published by Acclaim Press (currently out of print).
Upon arrival, there was nothing notable about the domestic call Officer Joe Schany and Officer Rod Rabine responded to on May 22, 2011. But shortly after stepping inside the front door of a home on the 3800 block of Girard Avenue North, Officer Schany heard something remarkable on his radio.
“Dispatch asked ‘can anybody confirm a tornado in North Minneapolis?’ I stepped outside, and wow, it was right there. We saw the big swirling debris and we confirmed it!” he remembers. He stared down the twister from about 150 yards away. “We went down to the basement and actually the domestic kind of went away. The two people that were fighting started hugging.“
Officer Schany heard that “freight train” sound everyone describes on the news. It was followed by moments of silence before car alarms and sirens filled the afternoon air. “You walk into a house on a domestic and you come out… it’s a totally different landscape. Just the devastation the tornado caused, you had to be in awe.”
The officer and his partner tried to navigate the streets, driving up on lawns at times to avoid massive trees that blocked Fremont Avenue. They helped folks out of their homes and quickly discovered one of the two people who were killed in the tornado — a man sitting in his car had been crushed by a massive fallen tree.
3,700 homes were damaged that Sunday afternoon. The tornado cut a three-and-a-half mile path through North Minneapolis, tossing around 6,000 trees, destroy- ing 350 traffic signs, 75 street lights, and 1,600 sidewalk panels.
Sergeant Chuck Peter remembers the weeks following the weather event. “A lot of officers were helping families gather belongings. Some people wanted to temporarily move out of the area and officers helped them load up their cars and trucks with boxes,” Sergeant Peter said.
“It was a memorable point in my career, what happened. I got to see the good of people and what can come out of it. I’ve experienced a lot of incidents that have been bad, but this (the cooperative aftermath) definitely ended up being one of the good ones,” Officer Schany concluded.
Article originally appeared in the Minneapolis StarTribune