JOHNSON — A roaring wake-up call jolted Cindy Weiss from her bed at 12:50 a.m. Friday.

She told her husband, Mike, something was going on outside their house on the northeast edge of Johnson.

Seconds later, the deafening wind, plus a fear in her stomach, told her it was a tornado.

They didn’t bother with the radio. Instead, she gathered wedding photos and the graduation portraits of their two children and they headed downstairs.

Soon, the wind died enough they could hear rain pounding their roof. And they felt thankful, because that meant they still had a roof.

In Johnson, a community of 280 people about 60 miles southeast of Lincoln, many people spoke words like “lucky” and “blessed” and “thankful” on Friday. While a tornado with wind speeds estimated at 108 mph hardly left their town unscathed, everyone knew things could have been much worse.

“It’s upsetting,” said Betty Pelican, a longtime resident. “But there’s no lives lost, no injuries and we can rebuild.”

Rebuilding was on the minds of scores of residents in and around Johnson who showed up before 8 a.m. with skid loaders, tractors, pickups and shovels.

By 11 a.m., volunteer crews consisting of firefighters, farmers, townspeople and teenagers who had the day off from school had picked up nearly all of the rubble that littered the downtown stretch of Main Street.

“They’ve already got the streets cleaned up,” said Wilma Koeneke as she looked out the window of the local grocery store. “That’s Johnson.”

It was as if people wanted to erase all signs of what the night sky had dropped on them: a 100-yard-wide twister that ran for about one-third of a mile.

Brian Smith, warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Valley, rated the tornado as an EF1 on the enhanced Fujita scale. The scale rates tornadoes, with 0 being the weakest and 5 being the strongest.

The storm that produced the tornado developed after midnight Friday where warmer air from the south clashed with cooler air from the north. The weather service detected rotational activity on radar and issued a tornado warning for Johnson at 12:41 a.m., nine minutes before the twister hit.

Reports from townspeople varied over whether they heard warning sirens before or after the storm. But most folks apparently knew what was happening.

“We went down into the basement when the sirens went off and saw all the lights on in the neighbors’ basements, too,” said Irene Seeba, a local kindergarten teacher and village board member.

The tornado first touched down near the southwest edge of Johnson and ran in a northeasterly direction. Johnson-Brock School, a kindergarten-through-12th grade building attended by 270 students, was right in the twister’s path.

Officials canceled classes Friday after they discovered damage to a membrane roof over the 6-year-old gymnasium. Superintendent Arlan Andreesen was hopeful the roof could be repaired rather than replaced.

The next big event scheduled for the gym is the May 10 graduation ceremony for the school’s 35 seniors.

“The seniors are worried about it. I told them we’ll just have to wait a couple months for graduation,” Andreesen joked.

Otherwise, the school building escaped damage, Andreesen said. However, a wall collapsed on the bus barn downtown, forcing staff to move buses to an outdoor location.

School will resume Monday, he added.

A block south of the school, several business owners spent the day assessing damage and calling their insurance carriers.

Kurt Knippelmier, owner of the White Horse Bar and Grill, stood behind the bar as friends and family sopped water from floors and tables. He said he lost nearly all of the metal roof over the business, which was evident by the water-logged pink insulation sagging through ceiling tiles.

“It was raining in here harder than it was outside,” he said, recalling the scene from the night before.

Still, Knippelmier said, the town supports his business, so he intends to repair and reopen.

At Pelican Locker and Meat Processing, Betty and Frank Pelican said they were dealing with roof and water damage as well. But they were open for business because the town never lost power for more than a few seconds.

Still, Betty Pelican was worried about the building they own across the street, which houses Mutt’s Buy-Way grocery store. The century-old brick structure didn’t weather the storm as well.

Inside the grocery store, school kids helped find dry spots for most of the food and merchandise. But even after the rain had long ago stopped, droplets tapped metal pie plates positioned in various locations on floors worn down by decades of shoppers.

Julie Thompson of Auburn, whose mother owns the store, said she worries the building will be condemned. She couldn’t predict whether the store will remain open.

A building converted into a residence across the street from the grocery store sustained the worst storm damage. The building’s front wall sloughed into the street in a pile of bricks and splintered lumber. The damage apparently left the man who lived there temporarily homeless.

Several homeowners around town reported roof and tree damage, said Lonnie Swanson, chairman of the Johnson Village Board. It also destroyed a couple of garages.

Duane Caspers, a member of the school board, predicted the people of Johnson will come together, count their blessings and then move forward.

“That’s what Johnson does.”

Reach Joe Duggan at 473-7239 or jduggan@journalstar.com.