Semi, hauling 40,000-pound loader, crashes into Hokah home, where mom and son were sitting

HOKAH, Minn. — She was sitting in her living room, watching TV with her 10-year-old son when the explosion happened.

More pictures of the incident can be found here.

Only it wasn’t an explosion. It was a semi crashing into Jessica McFarland’s living room Monday at her home on Mill Street in Hokah.

“It sounded like a bomb went off,” McFarland said, standing on the sidewalk outsider her home as snow fell.

“We heard a large noise, braking, a thump and then crash,” she added. “Windows blew in. Ceiling started cracking. And that’s when I realized the house got hit. My back was to the street. Debris flew right in front of me. My son was sitting next to me. I grabbed him and held him.”

Kevin Kappauf, the Hokah Assistant Fire Chief, just happened to be pulling into the fire station, a block away, when he saw the entire incident.

“It just came around the corner and it was glare ice,” Kappauf said. “There’s a half an inch of snow, packed down. He has a 40,000 pound front-end loader on the trailer and it just kind of pushed him off the side a little bit.”

That particular part of Mill Street, traffic heading east comes around a near 90-degree corner and down a hill. 

A large rock sits between the house and where traffic is coming from, around that corner.

The rock isn’t there for decoration. Kappauf, who’s lived in the area for 35 years, said the house has been hit several times.

“But not by a semi that bad. If you look, it’s sitting on top of a boulder that’s about this high,” he said, gesturing how big the boulder is. “They put that there to slow the cars down, because it happens so often. The sign around the corner, the signs are replaced a couple times a year.”

Nobody was hurt, though McFarland isn’t sure where her two cats are. She had rented the place the past eight years, but won’t be staying there any time soon, if ever again. 

The brick house is cracked from top to bottom — even on the opposite side of where the semi hit. Kappauf thinks it’ll be demolished.