Residents of Nevada are picking up the pieces
LDS church off limits due to structural damage
Ashby tried to hurry but fell on the shaking floor and then started crawling to his girls' room a few more feet away. The whole house was rumbling, things were falling off shelves and walls, and it was loud inside. Something hit Ashby in the head — he still isn't sure what — and he started bleeding.
When he reached his daughters, he saw they were awake and unharmed. For some reason, they decided to sleep together on the top level of their bunk bed during the night. They were fine but scared because their dad was bleeding badly from a gash in his head that he later had stitched up at a clinic in town.
Over the next 15 minutes, several aftershocks would send the girls under a table where they usually eat their meals. In the kitchen nearby, broken glass covered the floor. A crystal vase Ashby gave his wife for their first Christmas together 17 years ago fell and broke.
"It would be lovely to still have," Sara Ashby said inside her home. Even as she talked while standing in the kitchen, yet another of more than 30 aftershocks by Thursday afternoon could be felt.
There were other injuries reported around town, a few broken bones, other people needing stitches, David Ashby said. At around noon he was at the LDS church a few blocks away, plowing snow and ice away from sidewalks in anticipation of people showing up in search of comfort, perhaps a place to stay or a meal.
LDS Bishop Robert Johnson said the church donated $7,000 to the Red Cross and that they were ready to feed 200 if that many came for dinner in what he said is the biggest building in town besides the schools. But by late Thursday afternoon, structural engineers decided people should not be allowed within the chapel and gym and instead were being directed to a nearby elementary school.
Inside the church gymnasium, engineers were looking at cracks in the wall and some loose and fallen bricks from just beneath one of two huge wood support beams. The plan was to position some power poles under the beams. In fact, while a group of men were looking at the damage, an aftershock prompted everyone to take a step toward the door or at least out from under the beam.
"We're paying a little closer attention now," Ashby, who works for the U.S. Forest Service, said about the aftershocks.
Inside the church kitchen, a man was cleaning up fragments of dishes that had fallen to the floor.
"This is nothing compared to a lot of homes in town," Johnson said.
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