Dairy lost in Thursday storm

Twenty seconds.

If he’d been 20 seconds slower, Elier Dominguez said he would have lost his family.
Employed at the Brown Cow Dairy near the Missile Silo Park west of Greeley, Dominguez saw the storm coming Thursday morning and ran to his family’s mobile home. “I saw the dirt spinning in the sky,” he said, standing in the empty field where his home once stood. “I’d never seen a tornado, but whatever it was coming at us, I knew it was bad.”

He got to the mobile home, brought his wife, Ilde and son Jonathan, 3, out and they ran to the nearby dairy office for shelter. Twenty seconds later, their mobile home was gone.

The tornadoes that swept through Weld County Thursday hit the area around Missile Silo Park very hard. It was where one man died when he was swept up by the tornado, according to the Weld County Coroner’s Office.

The Brown Cow Dairy, where they milked 400 cows per day, was destroyed. Dead cows and calves were found in the fields, among the rubble from the storm’s path.
Rick Hertzke still owns the dairy, but was leasing it to Larry Dehaan, who owns other dairies in the county. Hertzke said the dairy was lost.

For more on this story, see Friday's Tribune.