Residents left picking up the pieces after last nights storm

OSCEOLA, Ind. - Two rounds of storms left a sea of debris and residents waking up Monday morning now having to pick up the pieces.

It was an early wake-up call for some Monday morning to clean up the mess leftover from some strong father's day storms.

”Right after our father’s day cookout, we were sitting on the deck and the gazebo was blowing all around. There was a big white wall of rain, the power went out. That tree over there fell on that line, bout pulled the pole down. So the whole neighborhood has been out since 6, 7 o'clock when that storm hit," Sam Callantine, one Osceola resident said.

Downed powerlines...

"You can hear the hum of the generators going," he said.

Fallen trees...

“The wind picked up and that’s when the hail started coming down. Raining. The wind was blowing. It kind of let up and stopped but 5 minutes later it started up again but it was bigger," Bryan Bixby, one Berrien Springs farmer said.

And hail the size of golf balls.

“I heard golf-sized hail balls just falling, hit my ac, windows, nothing broke, my car out here,' Justin Perry, one Berrien Spring resident said.

“It was anywhere from golf ball to just under baseball-sized hail at our place here," Bixby said.

While some were luckier,

“I had a bunch of leaves down, sticks down branches," Perry said.

Others have a lot more picking up to do.

“We’re trying to figure out how to get that one down," Denny Bierce, one Osceola resident said.

Like at brothers Jeff and Denny's...

"What time was it? 7? 7:15?" Bierce said.

“7:15 the wind came blowing in. My wife thought it was a hurricane, tornado," Jeff Clark said. "It was unbelievable the wind. Blowing. I didn’t realize this is my mother-in-law's and all the trees were blown down until this morning.”

"Most of the damage was done before we went to bed," Bierce said.

Just down the road, a tree lays limp over a power line and over at Jeff Clayton's house, it’s their cars that took the most damage.

Most – just shocked that the damage wasn’t worse.

“I’ve only seen hail once in my life like that and it wasn’t that big it was more pea-sized quarter-sized and that was back in 1997 and that kind of wiped everything out on the farm," Bixby said.

He owns Bixby farms in Berrien Springs and farms like his have been hammered this year. The pandemic paired with inclement weather has just been unkind to crops. And now, with two storms overnight, he said he's is glad it wasn’t worse.

“That’s never something a farmer wants to hear is hail. That’s one thing that will devastate you real quick. It usually does a lot more damage than this one did," he said. "Despite the freezing and the drought and now hail, these poor berries I don’t think can take any more."