Downtown Sutton shut down while officials assess tornado damage

SUTTON, Neb. -- Downtown Sutton is shut down to traffic. Locals are assessing damage after a tornado hit the small Clay County town on Saturday. Local emergency manager says it was a bad situation. 

“Saturday morning it was hectic for a while. We had a lot of people, after the sirens went off after the tornado was gone through, we had a lot of people looking, everybody wanted to see," Quail said. "We tried, we blocked off all of Main Street to stop traffic from going through because we didn’t know what damage we had.”

Residents in Sutton woke up Saturday morning to the sound of sirens alerting them of a tornado. According to the National Weather Service, the tornado developed just northwest of Sutton.

It mostly damaged the downtown area, where a steel roof was peeled off a building and lifted one block, several trees were snapped and there was some minor damages to homes.

The EF-1 tornado continued to move southeast across the city, damaging a maintenance shed on a golf course, before lifting up a mile southeast of Sutton.

Emergency Manager Alan Quail Sutton said he's grateful nobody was hurt.

“First thing we did was go house to house, through every business to check in for injuries," Quail said. "That was the major priority, of which we had none. We had no injuries whatsoever. Then it was a matter of assessing damage."

Manager of the local Cornerstone Bank branch, Brad Freese, said the tornado caused some damage to the bank. 

“When the tornado came through it looked like it took out, peeled off a portion of the roof kind of in the middle of the building. And from there, you know, had some water came in, because it rained three to four inches that morning. So, that’s some pretty good water damage  leak in from the second floor down to our level," Freese said. 

Structure engineers and contractors are assessing the damage on downtown businesses, and they don’t know how much longer it will take. 

For now, downtown will remain shut down to traffic until officials deem it safe.