STORM HITS FARM NEAR GORDONVILLE

Paul Keller was half asleep in front of the television set in the living room of his home near Gordonville Monday night when the sound of an approaching storm roused him.

He looked outside, and except for a few streaks of lightning in the distance the sky was dark. Still, Keller could see debris flying by his window.

His wife, Irma, was on the porch telling him it was time they headed for the basement. They had barely gotten downstairs when a strong gust blew out a window, sending glass all over the living room and knocking pictures and a clock from the kitchen wall at the opposite end of the house.

In a few moments it was over. The storm had passed.

The storm was part of an evening of inclement weather that pounded Southeast Missouri, Southern Illinois and Western Kentucky. The storms kept members of the National Weather Service in Paducah, Ky., hopping throughout the day Tuesday.

During April and May, chances of severe weather increase in the region, said Pat Spoden, a science and operations officer for the National Weather Service. "You have to watch the weather every day," he said.

Spoden said most weather service personnel spent Tuesday in the field surveying sites in Illinois and Kentucky trying to determine if any tornadoes had touched down. The day was so busy that they weren't able to examine sites in Missouri.

The easy way to know if a storm has in fact been a tornado is for someone to see a funnel cloud. Without a witness, meteorologists and other investigators must examine the damage path of a storm and interpret the data before concluding whether a tornado has passed through.

Investigators look at patterns of damage to see if it is headed in one direction or seems to be going different ways. Damage facing different directions may be a sign that a tornado has touched down.

Tornadoes often pass through an area quickly. If the storm is over in a short period, that may also be an indication of a tornado.

But not always.

"It's not always clear exactly what it is," Spoden said. "It would nice if they fell into a nice, neat category, but they don't."

Because he hadn't seen damage done to the Keller's farm, Spoden wouldn't speculate on whether it was a tornado, but he said it could have been. He did say that winds up to 70 mph had been reported in Southeast Missouri Monday night.

For Iris Dordoni there was no doubt. "It was a tornado," she said.

Dordoni, the daughter of Paul and Irma Keller, pointed to sheets of tin that had been blown off the barn roof and into the tops of trees where they twisted around branches 30 feet off the ground. Other trees that had been standing the day before lay uprooted on the ground.

"We were just out here Easter Sunday snooping around, looking at the buildings," she said, motioning to a pile of tin and lumber that had once been a shed.

"It's weird: The sheds aren't even around any more," she said.

The Kellers, whose family has lived in the house for nearly 100 years, went out Monday night with flashlights to see what damage had been done but couldn't see much. Their electrical lines were down and lying in the yard. They were still without power Tuesday.

They weren't able to examine the extent of the damage until Tuesday morning. They saw the roof of one barn ripped almost completely off. Windows in the repair shop were blown out, the roof was gone and a large, sliding metal door was pushed in.

An aluminum ladder that had been sitting outside the back door of the house had somehow been carried around a building and deposited undamaged on the ground. An old wooden outhouse, long unused, was flipped over.

Damage to the house was minimal. A few of its original slate shingles were blown off.

Irma Keller was most concerned about her dog, fearing he had been killed in the storm.

"We looked in his favorite spots, and we couldn't find him," she said. She heaved a sigh of relief when her daughter told her the dog was OK.

The National Weather Service said Tuesday it is tracking another storm system out of Kansas and Oklahoma that was due to arrive in the region Tuesday night. The storm had the potential of being more severe than Monday's weather.

Although the potential for tornadoes is greatest in the late afternoon and early evening because the air is unstable, tornadoes can happen at any time during the day, even in the middle of the night, Spoden said.

"In weather we never say never," he said. "Just when we say it shouldn't happen in a certain way, Mother Nature has a way of making it so."