By Kathleen Bailey

Last year on July 24, Epsom Selectmen Chairman Bob Blodgett was investigating a blasting complaint when his wife, Anne, called, informing him that a tree was down on Goboro Road. Blodgett went to Goboro Road, discovered that the downed tree was on the Chichester side, and waited until Chichester town personnel came to cut up the tree. While waiting, his cell phone began to ring, with calls as far away as Atlanta, Ga. But Blodgett still didn’t know what his town was facing. When he got a call from Gov. John Lynch’s office to meet him at the junction of routes 4 and 107, he went -- and after fighting his way through a knot of emergency vehicles and roadblocks, he learned that Epsom had been hit with a tornado.

They were at work, at the store, or home with children on summer vacation. Each resident of Epsom, Deerfield and Northwood has a story about where they were when the 2008 tornado cut its way through their town. The twister changed the landscape -- and their lives -- forever.

The tornado tore through towns from Free-dom to Epsom. It produced winds of 111 to 135 mph and was categorized as an EF2 to EF 1 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, which measures damage from wind speed. An EF5, more than 200 mph, is the highest rating. And no one saw it coming: the National Weather Service did not issue a tornado warning until one person had already been killed.

Talk of the town
Blodgett, born and raised in Penacook, had never seen a twister before. The closest he’s ever come, he said, was the 1938 hurricane.

Routes 4 and 28 were the only main roads open, with the junction of 4 and 107 congested by emergency vehicles. Echo Valley and Griffin roads, shared with Deerfield, were completely blocked off. The town decided to open the Center Hill Road bridge, even though it still needed some backfill and paving, so people could have a way to and from Route 4. As a town father, Blodgett went right to work to help his people. He stayed at the emergency shelter at the school until evening, making sure there was enough of everything. He and Road Agent Gordon Ellis took water, paper products and canned goods to isolated families.

Other volunteers opened roads for traffic, checked on seniors, and searched through the debris. Chainsaws buzzed as town workers tried to clear the roads and homeowners tried to clean their yards.

“We worked steady for a week,” Blodgett said. But it showed him and Epsom what they could do.

“They did a great job,” he said of his fellow townspeople. “Everyone pitched in.”

While the town already had an emergency management director, Rick Bilodeau, who “dug in and took over,” the twister gave Epsom an impetus to fine tune its emergency management operation.

“We’ve been updating it all the time since then,” Blodgett said. “In the future, no matter what it is, we’ll be prepared.”

Fellow selectman Joanne Randall agreed. The town had already begun working on emergency management plans, due to three successive floods. But they weren’t “mentally prepared” for a tornado, she added, and the twister called for even more planning.

“It forced us to think on a bigger scale,” she said. “Now we know we have to prepare for anything.”

Randall was at work July 24. Running an errand at lunchtime, she heard a radio item about a tornado passing through Epsom. It was a “weird” thing to hear, she recalled, especially since it wasn’t raining in Concord. She called it a day and tried to get home to her town and family.

The week of July 24 had already been a rough one for Epsom, with a shorthanded police department, a barn fire that turned out to be arson, and a fatal motor vehicle accident.

Randall had trouble getting through the vehicles and emergency personnel at routes 4 and 107, but finally made it. When she reached “incident command,” she learned of the death of Brenda Stevens, who lived just over the town line in Deerfield.

“That’s when it hit me,” Randall said.

The town was in shock for a day and a half, she said.

“We all wondered, ‘What just happened to us?’” But there was work to do. Fire Chief Stewart Yeaton took the helm at Incident Command, with help from Police Chief Wayne Preve and Bilodeau. But there was more help, Randall said: about 30 other towns and agencies pitched in to help.

Most of the property damage was personal, not municipal, she said. No town buildings were damaged, and FEMA allotted $25,000 to Epsom to clean up roadways, ditches and downed trees.

Since the twister, Epsom has taken several steps to be more prepared, she said. In March, the townspeople passed a budget allowing for better police wages and the hiring of two or three new officers.

This is a direct result of the tornado, Randall believes.

“They knew we were short-staffed during the disaster,” she said.

Fire Chief Stewart Yeaton has begun an Explorer post, so the young men and women will be trained to help out in emergencies, she added. And with FEMA and town funds, they’ve improved culverts, ditches and bridges.

“Drainage -- that’s huge,” Randall said.”

Epsom did recover from the tornado, and a few weeks later held its annual Old Home Day. That’s when Joanne Randall finally knew the storm was over.

“It was,” she said, “our biggest turnout in years. People were so glad to be there. It was as if they dug in their heels and reinforced their commitment to Epsom. It was a celebration of our community.”

Home front
On that July 24, Aileen Jones of Old Ritchie Road, in Deerfield near the Epsom line, was relaxing at home with her three children. Her husband, Bill, was working at his diesel business on the property. Her oldest son, now 13, wanted to ride his bicycle, and Jones said no. “I just had the feeling,” she said, “that I didn’t want him outside.”

At 11:30 a.m. she heard a loud “boom,” and her older son went out on the back deck.

“We saw a green wall coming toward us,” she said. She locked the back door just as all the trees ringing the house fell down at the same time. She had seen the majestic pines bend before storms before and thought, “Surely they’re going to come back up.” But they didn’t.

She saw the largest pine tree in the yard ripped from its roots and come flying through the air. That was enough for Jones, who grabbed her infant daughter and told her older son to take the younger downstairs. With her baby on her hip and holding her dog by the collar, she and her family tumbled down the stairs to the basement and Bill’s workshop. She rushed her brood into the half-bath and laundry room Bill uses when he’s working, and put the two older children in a corner where two concrete walls meet.

“If I had to, I was going to lay my body over them,” she said. With the baby in her arms and the dog by its collar, she sat down on a pile of laundry.

As they put their lives and home back together, with help, Jones got a fresh sense of what matters. “It’s family and friends,” she said, adding, "I'm so grateful."