— Arlene Hedlund has lived in her home on Oakland Beach Lane for 26 years. Until Monday night, when a tornado touched down in the area just after 8 p.m., it stood next to a white garage. On Wednesday afternoon, the garage was gone, and Hedlund sat in a chair near the empty spot where it once stood, eating ice cream handed out by volunteers alongside her daughter, Amanda Wagenman.
Hedlund said she had heard the storm was tracking north of Audubon, and in her experience, storms like that usually moved south. She thought they might get some rain and wind, not what actually came. Her home has no basement beneath it, she explained, so she would have had to go outside to go to an underground shelter. By the time she realized it was serious, she had nowhere to go.
“I sat on the couch and prayed,” she said.
She remembers hearing her tin roof fly off. She said her deck furniture lifted toward Floyd Lake before the wind shifted and blew it back. Following the storm, she spent Monday night at her granddaughter’s home. The days-long cleanup effort since has been exhausting.
From left, Arlene Hedlund, who has lived in her Oakland Beach Lane home for 26 years, and her daughter, Amanda Wagenman, look to where a garage once stood on Wednesday, July 8, 2026. The garage was destroyed in a tornado that touched down in the area on Monday, July 6, 2026.
Abby Fostveit / Detroit Lakes Tribune
“I worked all my life for this,” Hedlund said, looking out over her property. She retired in September after a career as a branch manager for Midwest Bank in Callaway, which she said she dearly loved.
The garage that once stood beside her home also sheltered her car, which sustained damage to a passenger-side window. Her collector’s vehicle — a blue 1972 Chevrolet Malibu that once belonged to her parents — came through with only minor damage.
For Hedlund and Wagenman, the lesson they hope others take from Monday is not to wait for a phone alert to act, or if you receive an alert, take it seriously.
“Don’t wait for a warning, watch the weather,” Wagenman said.
A short distance away that Wednesday afternoon, on Oakland Beach Road, Karen Anderson spent Wednesday raking tree debris out of a neighbor’s muddy lawn. Her own home escaped with minimal damage, she said, just some fallen trees and roof damage. Her daughter and two grandchildren were inside when the storm hit and took cover in the basement. Anderson herself was in Fargo, watching the storm unfold on the radar.
She turned her attention to helping people. When asked about the volunteers, including strangers, who had shown up to help her neighbors, Anderson grew teary.
“Everybody is so good at helping each other here,” she said. “We were some of the more fortunate people, so we’ve been helping.”
She said the road, once home to dozens of oak trees, will never look the same.
“What is really devastating is this is not going to look like Oakland Beach Road ever again,” Anderson said. “But it’s good people working together.”
Friends and volunteers assisting with clean-up efforts gather around where Tom Seaworth’s garage once stood on Wednesday, July 8, 2026. The area sustained major damage following a tornado that touched down on Monday, July 6, 2026.
Abby Fostveit / Detroit Lakes Tribune
Tom Seaworth had 13 family members in his home on Oakland Beach Road when the storm hit Monday evening. They all made it to the basement. By Wednesday morning, friends and family were back at the property clearing trees and debris, while across the road, the Seaworths’ garage lay in pieces.
Seaworth said the sound of trees falling was constant as the storm passed over. More than 30 trees were knocked down or snapped, some crashing across the yard and onto the house and attached deck. Windows broke, and doors were blocked, he said.
Power poles and lines came down, leaving his family, like many others, reliant on generators and improvised solutions, including toilets flushed with water from their hot tub. Getting out of the house after the storm passed was its own ordeal.
“When we could detect the storm had passed, we came out — I could not get out of the doors of my house,” Seaworth said. “I had to push the door and then crawl out, and crawl up and down through the branches and the trees to get over to this mess and find my chainsaw.”
The family had been told to evacuate Monday night over a suspected propane tank leak in the area. Seaworth said people walked down the road to catch buses shuttling residents who needed shelter to M State.
By Wednesday, he said, progress was visible, as he pointed to a brand-new power pole already standing next to where his garage used to be. Seaworth, who said he has always had trouble asking for help, said the response from strangers as well as family has been humbling.
Marilyn Guy stands outside of her Oakland Beach Road home, which she has lived in since 1997, on Wednesday, July 8, 2026. The home sustained major damage after a tornado touched down in the area on Monday, July 6, 2026.
Abby Fostveit / Detroit Lakes Tribune
“It’s a reminder of why we live here,” he said. “So many people show up — they just show up.”
Marilyn Guy’s home on Oakland Beach Road sustained major damage, most visibly to its roof. Walking out of the main doors of the home on Wednesday, the first thing she wanted to say was that no one had been hurt.
Guy spoke with gratitude about the first responders who came to her family’s aid Monday night after a report of a gas leak from propane tanks in the area. Officers led them from the home, she said, through downed trees and downed power lines to safety.
“They took us across the way, through down trees, through down power lines — and we were just so grateful for them,” she said. “There was about a half a mile of road here filled on both sides with emergency vehicles.”
She recalled the moment the warning came to head downstairs, and the sound of the roof popping above them.
“We didn’t know what was happening, and then we had some pictures on the wall that fell off, so we knew the house was shaking,” she said. “We came out of the room that we were in downstairs, which is an enclosed utility room, and we looked out the ground-level window toward the lake, and we could see trees dropping.”
Damage sustained by Tom Seaworth’s home on Oakland Beach Road pictured on Wednesday, July 8, 2026. Along with structural damage, Seawoth said over 30 trees were lost on his property following a tornado that touched down in the area on Monday, July 6, 2026.
Abby Fostveit / Detroit Lakes Tribune
Guy said it was painful to watch 100-year-old oak trees come down, since they were the same trees that gave Oakland Beach its name. It wasn’t until the family returned in the morning that the extent of the damage set in.
“We’ve lived in this lake home since 1997, and there are a lot of memories of our children and our grandchildren growing up and enjoying these trees,” she said. “And now they’re not there. It’s going to be different, and that’s hard.”
The family is also still missing their pontoon boat, and their dock was left in pieces. Guy and her husband spent Monday night at a Holiday Inn and didn’t sleep, she said.
“I think we were kind of in shock, because you never expect it to happen to you. You hear about it, and you read about it, and you see it, you go and help,” she said. “We can stay in our home, but it doesn’t feel like home right now.”
Updates and other information on the tornado can be found on the Becker Sheriff’s Office
.