Rocked by the wind: a tornado and a recession have kept Windsor's once highflying growth in check.

• Author: Lewis, David
• Position: WHO OWNS COLORADO

Windsor, Colo., has been torn by two terrible storms in the past couple of years, one real, one a metaphor.

The metaphorical one might have hurt worse, economically at least.

The real storm was the mile-wide tornado that ripped the town May 22, 2008, when wind speeds ranged from 130 mph to 150 mph along a track stretching 34 miles. The tornado destroyed about 100 homes, damaging another 100 or so and killing Oscar Manchester, 52.

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The category 4 storm clipped one corner of Water Valley, a 1,500-acre, mainly residential development on Windsor's southern edge. Marketing vice president Jim Jensen was there with a camera.

"It was baseball-sized hail. The tornado cloud was so massive it did not look like a tornado at all," Jensen says "I was taking pictures of this thing coming. When you have thousands of baseball-size hail balls hitting your roof per minute, you can't hear anything, so we couldn't hear the force of the storm. Once the storm had come and gone we heard the sirens go, and we took off and drove down the street, and saw some buildings that were just torn apart."

Water Valley lucked out, Jensen says. "It hit the corner of us and did some damage to some roofs, to some commercial buildings, and broke some windows. If you drove through Water Valley today there would be no visible sign of it."

With one exception, which no one ColoradoBiz spoke with would name, the insurance industry came through for the town, too.

The metaphorical storm, the great recession in which we find ourselves for the third year, was even bigger and almost as damaging.

Oddly, both devastating events might prove economically beneficial to Windsor in the long run: The tornado produced economic benefits with the flood of aid and construction workers that followed; the recession, by slowing the town's formerly phenomenal growth, gives it a breathing period before the next surge of development.

Windsor's master plan calls for growth dictated by the market and limitations in geography and its water and sewer infrastructure.

"I first started here in 1996 and for the first six, seven, eight years, we were growing at over 10 percent per year," says Director of Planning Joseph Plummer. "It stayed around the 7 percent to 9 percent range for the first part of this decade, and the last couple of years it has tapered off to probably 1.5...