‘It just happened so quick’: Tornado rips roof off business while employees still inside

DEERFIELD, Wis. — The National Weather Service confirmed an EF0 tornado touched down in Deerfield Thursday afternoon.

Although that’s the smallest scale tornado, with wind speeds up to 80 miles per hour, it still caused a lot of damage to the International Machinery Exchange (IME) building there.

They say there’s a first time for everything, but most people don’t want to experience a tornado at any time. IME’s general manager and vice president Jeff Klemp said his daughter was the first to know it was coming straight towards them.

“My daughter looked out the window and said, ‘Dad, there’s a tornado coming here. What are we supposed to do? Where are we supposed to go?’ and then hail started hitting the building very hard, and then right after that, it just happened so quick that we couldn’t really do much of anything,” said Klemp.

Three employees were inside at the time. No one was injured. Klemp said if the tornado had come through 30 minutes earlier, around 20 employees would have been inside, and the situation could have been much worse.

“I’m good now. Yesterday was a little rough though,” Klemp said.

They’re just left with pieces to pick up, and a story to tell of their first time experiencing a tornado.

“Now it’s just cleanup time. Trying to figure out how to get the business back going, get the power back on so we can get back to work,” Klemp said. “I think this was just a fluke. Watching the news last night, how they explained why it hit here, it’s just a fluke that a tornado hit us. There’s never been a tornado around here that I’m aware of.”

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