A local farm family is “thankful to the good Lord” there were no serious injuries after a dump truck careened off the road and hit their 100-year-old home so hard that the structure was moved off its foundation.
Dorothy Burton, 74, said she had just washed her hands and was leaving the first floor bathroom area of the home when the Edge Construction single-axle dump truck hit that portion of the house at 11 a.m. Tuesday.
Burton said she is unsure just how fast the truck was going, but at the moment the truck hit the house she heard a loud noise and felt the home shift under her feet.
“The good Lord was with us,” she said in the aftermath of looking at her home of 46 years at 10782 E. County Road 450N, where the interior was filled with family possessions tossed about and around the floor after the collision.
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Burton’s first instinct was to call out to her disabled son Bruce, 52, who was in an upstairs bedroom just above the bathroom where the dump truck hit the house.
“The first thing I did — we have a handicapped son who was upstairs — and I yelled, ‘Are you OK?’ “ she said. “I told him to get downstairs right away.”
The two went around the debris that now littered their first floor and were told by first responders not to re-enter the home, because the foundation had been damaged and was not stable.
“The whole house has moved off its foundation,” she said.
Dorothy Burton’s husband, Donald, 74, went to check on the driver of the truck, identified by Bartholomew County Sheriff’s deputies as Geoffrey Jones, 27, Columbus, who was still in the cab, she said. The young man was bleeding but not seriously hurt, she said, and was being attended to by ambulance personnel at the scene.
The truck was on County Road 450N when it left the road for an unknown reason and traveled through a wheat field, the farm house’s fence and sign and then into the Burton’s house, deputies said.
Deputies also did a field sobriety test on Jones at the scene.
The house, which was built in 1918 by Dorothy Burton’s grandfather, sustained severe structural damage and was to be secured and boarded up before the Burton family left to stay with relatives, she said.
The Burton family raises cattle on the farm property and rents out some surrounding farmland, she said.
Investigators do not know how fast the Edge Construction dump truck was traveling when it collided with the house. Edge Construction lists a post office box as its mailing address in Columbus.
The Burton’s home is insured and Dorothy Burton said she hoped that the dump truck owner was also insured.
Columbus Township and Clifford fire departments were working at the scene to stabilize the home’s foundation. The Indiana State Police Department of Transportation Enforcement was also at the scene.
Nothing like this had ever happened before, and Dorothy Burton said the family was just coming to terms with the damage and the mess inside the house.
“The good Lord was with all of us us — and that includes the man who hit the house,” she said.
