[Northern Virginia Daily] Franwood Farm No. 1 is reeling from a double dose of disaster.

A recent outbreak of avian flu meant 100,000 of the farm’s turkeys had to be destroyed, leaving the poultry houses at 288 Franwood Lane empty for the first time since 1937.

Then Sunday’s tornado smashed them to pieces.

“There’s two things I’ve always been certain of,” said Sadonna Long.

“One, that we’d never be hit by a tornado, and two, that I knew where I was going if a tornado came.”

Long’s husband, Stephen, saw the funnel cloud touch down from a hangar across the lane where he was watching television with his brother, Allan.

“He called me on his cell phone and said ‘Get to the middle of the house, it’s coming!'” she said.

So Mrs. Long and her sons, Jeremy Orebaugh, 25, and Sid Dunn, 17, dove for the basement.

“The roar got really bad,” Mrs. Long said. “Debris started hitting the house so bad and our ears started popping, and that’s when we all hit the floor on our stomachs.”

After the sound subsided, her sons ran up the stairs, shouting, “Oh my God! Oh my God!” she said.

Mrs. Long followed in a daze, and gazed out at the path the tornado had cut across her property.

“I was very disoriented,” she said. “It’s like a bomb’s gone off, and all you notice is there’s two perfectly formed rainbows over a landscape that’s been totally devastated.”

Across the way, her husband and four others stumbled out of the ruins of the hangar, shaken but still standing.

The family home is built of brick and survived the damage well, she said.

Even so, most of the windows were shattered, and five blew out completely – storm windows and all, Mrs. Long said.

The garage doors were ripped off, a machine shed was destroyed, and the guttering came loose. The family has moved nine dump truck loads of splintered trees out of the yard.

One dog was killed and another is injured – the family thinks it was thrown about 100 yards, Mrs. Long said.

But the turkey houses fared the worst.

Two were completely lost, including one that was under quarantine, and four suffered severe damage, she said.

“Unfortunately, because our farm is technically quarantined, we have had to deal with a lot of government and the USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture] as well as just cleaning up the mess,” she said.

On Wednesday, the contaminated turkey house was burned.

“Avian flu can’t survive in high heat – that’ll kill it,” Mrs. Long said.

But it cannot kill the family’s fighting spirit.

“I try to always make something positive about something bad,” she said. “I believe there’s a reason for everything. … My theory is sort of, if God didn’t let anybody be killed on this farm, he sure isn’t going to let anyone starve on this farm.”

Today, 50 children from the Shenandoah Valley Adventist Elementary School will step in to help to clean up the smaller debris, she said. The farm also has received support and offers of help from the community and from Pilgrim’s Pride.

Meanwhile, the family is wasting no time crying over spilt milk.

“We’ve got 13 men on this farm with no turkeys to look after, and they’ve just been working and working and working and getting it done,” Long said.