BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — Survivors of one of the deadliest tornadoes in Minnesota history will gather Tuesday in Outing.
They’ll picnic, share stories and dedicate a monument to those who lost their lives – eleven of them in and around a single lake.
“It just changes the way you look at the rest of life,” says Dan Brokke who survived the tornado but lost his 13-year-old brother Paul.
Brokke’s family was among a gathering of vacationing church members from Bethany Fellowship in Bloomington staying in cabins at the edge of Roosevelt Lake.
On August 6, 1969, just before 5 p.m., the tornado bore down.
"Seventeen of us had all run into one cabin down by the lake,” Sue Moline recalls. “I was standing there and the cabin started moving.”
Moline, 17 at the time, was knocked to the floor as the cabin was ripped off its foundation.
Terry Dugan, Moline’s uncle, described the deafening noise as the cabin was ripped apart, “like a hundred carpenters all pulling a nail out of a board at once.”
"And then," Dugan continued, “just suddenly in the water.”
Cabin and occupants had been tossed into Lake Roosevelt.
Dugan’s sister, Diane Dahlen, compared what happened next to “thrashing around like a washing machine.”
“We knew,” Moline says, “knew you were going to die.”
Some in the cabin surfaced and clung to floating debris, some swam to shore and four drowned – among them Moline’s 19-year-old sister Becky, Brokke’s brother Paul, and Dugan and Dahlen’s mother Edith and five-year-old niece Sharon Dugan.
Bethany's Evy Carlson and her parents Arthur and Minnie Olson also died - the members all brought to the church in seven hearses.
“It's really hard for anybody to process it, but we were just kids,” Moline says.
Across northern Minnesota, a total of 15 people died in a series of tornadoes.
Fifty years later, the survivors are trying to make sense of it still.
“For a long time I’d start every day with just, ‘Thank you God for life,’"Moline says. "You shouldn’t take life for granted."