Isolated storms ripped through Three Rivers Wednesday night leaving the YMCA's Camp Eberhart in shambles.
About 50 South Bend elementary school students were at the camp when storms tore down more than 100 trees.
The camp director says fortunately none of the campers were hurt, and there wasn't any significant structural damage.
But the damage has caused the camp to do something it's only had to do a handful of times in it's nearly 100 years of existence - turn campers away.
“We'd be going into our family labor day camp weekend tomorrow and we'll have to cancel that for the first time,” Camp Director Brice Emanuel said Thursday evening.
Emanuel says 200 campers scheduled to spend the weekend will have to find a different way to celebrate Labor Day.
“We lost power, so we've been without power for the last 24 hours. This is the second storm that we've seen hit us in the last 7 days,” Emanuel said.
Emanuel says the storms last Thursday did extensive damage to trees as well, although they were able to clean that mess up before Wednesday’s storms.
“Safety-wise we have trees that are still dangling out in the woods that we need to take down before I'll be comfortable letting children walk out in the woods...I've been doing this for a long time and I've never seen this much destruction from storms in my entire career,” Emanuel said.
Emanuel says he counted at least 20 crews working to sort through the wreckage...but it may just be the tip of the iceberg.
“We have 200 acres and we haven't even touched the back part of the property yet. The 200 trees we've counted are all in the 50 main acres of our camp area at this point,” Emanuel said.
Around 7pm Thursday, the camp finally got power back; but there's still a lot of work left to do.
Emanuel says the next steps are to clear the larger trees that could be dangerous from the campground, then get to the debris.
They hope to have things cleaned up well enough to open up for operation next week. The camp thinks the storms did around $20,000 in damage.
They're hoping for monetary support, especially from former campers.