By TODD FLORY

Salina Journal

For businesses such as cabinetmaker Crestwood, last Wednesday's tornado that churned across southern Saline County could have done much more than structural damage.

"In our business, we can't afford to be down," said Crestwood President Mike Junk. "Two weeks would just kill us with our customer base and everything."

But a little less than a week after a tornado ripped a hole in the roof at the business at 601 E. Water Well, Crestwood has made temporary repairs and is back in business.

With the plant now dry and equipment moved and set up in other parts of the plant, Junk said Tuesday that Crestwood was about 80 percent up and running and should be close to 100 percent operational by today or Thursday.

The tornado ripped a 10,000-square-foot hole in the northeast section of Crestwood's roof and sucked the girders and steel supports out of the building and into the parking lot. In all, Junk said, there were 20,000 square feet of structural damage.

"The majority of product damage was caused by the fact that it broke a fire and sprinkler main -- a 6-inch pipe that was pumping in about 3,500 gallons a minute of water into our plant for about two hours," Junk said.

Cleanup at the plant began Thursday morning. With brooms and pumps, employees spent most of Thursday ridding the plant of an estimated 500,000 gallons of water, as well as moving equipment to other, drier parts of the building.

Junk estimated the reconstruction would cost between $1 million and $2 million, with completion sometime in the fall. That cost will include a temporary partition to isolate the part of the plant where the roof was torn off and other general construction, which will be done by Frank Construction, Salina.

"We'll get used to it and forget that we even had that space there," Junk said.

He appreciates the support Crestwood has received since the storm.

"We were very fortunate," he said. "The contractors that did our building all came up without even having to call them up. They were there immediately. It was just an amazing outpouring of all the different people that aided us."

Spark's Kennels recovers

Darcy Smith, Bennington, owner of Spark's Kennels, 1541 E. Water Well, said last week's tornado demolished the kennel's office, located in a trailer next to the kennel building.

No animals were harmed in the storm, and no one was in the office at the time.

Power was restored shortly after the tornado, and Smith is using a portion of the kennel as a temporary office.

"We're carrying on the best way we can and shipping puppies again this week," Smith said. "We are lucky. We are blessed compared to the people in Chapman. And I didn't lose any of my puppies. They were all safe, and my family's safe. My home is safe, so we are blessed."

The tornado ripped the roof off the office and deposited much of it in the trees located just behind the building. Pieces of the office have been found a quarter-mile away, and Smith said some of the computers still have not been found. Until normalcy is once reached, Smith is finding out how much business owners take for granted in their daily work.

"You can't imagine until you go to look for something and it's not there," she said. "The phone lines, the faxes, the computers ... you don't realize how much you need those when you run a business until they're gone."

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