St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church has always been a gathering point for Henryville, never more so than now. Under a roof with a patched-up six-foot hole, dozens gathered Sunday not just to worship, but to check on neighbors and get updates on the devastation from the weekend's tornadoes.
Along the Ohio River between Indiana and Kentucky, where small towns were nearly wiped from the map, the damage is clear from a trail of smashed homes, downed trees and lost lives. At least 37 people were killed in the storm system that struck Friday night and rescuers were still going door-to-door in rural areas to rule out more victims.
But the storms thrashed the conveniences of modern life, too: Cell phone signals were hard to find, email was hard to come by, electricity indefinitely interrupted. People went back to basics or got creative to learn about their loved ones and begin rebuilding.
"It's horrible. It's things you take for granted that aren't there anymore," said Jack Cleveland, 50, of Henryville, a Census Bureau worker.
In many cases, word-of-mouth is replacing the conversations that would usually happen by cell phone or e-mail.
Randy Mattingly, a 24-year-old mechanic, said he and his neighbors passed on information by word-of-mouth to make sure people were OK: "It was like, `Hey, did you talk to this guy?'" He said state police quickly set up two gathering points for adults and children, at the church and at a nearby community center.
At Sunday's mass, Father Steve Schaftlein turned the church into an information exchange, asking the 100 or so in attendance to stand up and share information. Immediately, volunteers stood to share tips about functioning in what is in many ways a tech-free zone.
Lisa Smith, who has been Henryville's postmaster for six weeks, told people that they could pick up their mail in Scottsburg, about 10 miles north. She said she was most worried about people needing medication and she had been shaking boxes to see if they had pills inside with hopes of connecting them to their recipients.
A local insurance agent, Lyn Murphy-Carter, shared another story. The founder of her agency, 84-year-old Tom Murphy, had told her always to keep paper records. That proved valuable without access to computers. She collected about 1,000 claims Saturday alone, and was gathering handwritten claims from policyholders at church.
In West Liberty, Ky., about 85 miles east of Lexington, loss of technology led to a confusing and stressful aftermath for Doris Shuck, who was cleaning her house when the storm approached. She grabbed her laptop, cell phone and iPod and put them in a tote bag to bring down to the basement. The storms took her home, leaving only the basement and front porch. Huge piles of debris and mattresses were strewn in the back yard.
"I could hear the glass and hear the wood breaking. I just thought the house is going to fall on top of me," she said. She had scrapes and bruises.
After the storm passed, she received a text message from her mother, 70 miles away in Prestonsburg, but couldn't reply.
"I was just trying to figure out what had happened and get my thoughts together and my phone beeped and I looked and it was from my mom. I couldn't answer it," Shuck said. She went to the hospital where she works, but there was no Internet access there, either.
She reunited with her husband and daughter at the hospital and left for Prestonsburg to let her mother know they were OK. But they didn't know her parents were on their way to West Liberty at the same time.
"We had no way to communicate that to each other. We're so used to our cell phones and instant messaging. We didn't have any of that."
Her parents asked a state fish and wildlife officer to go to their home. The officer eventually found Doris Shuck's name on a list at the hospital for people who were accounted for.
While it could be days before power and cell service are fully restored to the damaged areas, crews were making progress Sunday. In Indiana, about 2,800 homes were without power, down from 8,000 in the hours after the storms. But in some hard-hit areas, like Henryville, a substation and transmission lines need to be rebuilt, and that could take up to a week.
Almost 19,000 customers were without power in Kentucky, according to the state's Public Service Commission, and a few thousand more from municipal utilities and TVA, which the PSC does not track.
Cell phone companies were trying to help residents by setting up mobile charging stations and email stations so they could communicate while power and cell service was still difficult to find.
Even with life upended in so many ways, one family got a reminder that even a deadly tornado can't uproot everything.
The home that Shalonda Kerr shares with her husband and Jack Russell terrier outside of Chelsea, Ind., was obliterated: The front wall was ripped clean, leaving the home looking eerily like a shaken dollhouse. An upended couch and a tipped-over fish tank lay in the rubble.
The mailbox was untouched. Its front hatch was tipped open, revealing a white piece of paper.
"Inside was a $300 IRS bill," Kerr said, laughing amid the ruins.
Along the Ohio River between Indiana and Kentucky, where small towns were nearly wiped from the map, the damage is clear from a trail of smashed homes, downed trees and lost lives. At least 37 people were killed in the storm system that struck Friday night and rescuers were still going door-to-door in rural areas to rule out more victims.
But the storms thrashed the conveniences of modern life, too: Cell phone signals were hard to find, email was hard to come by, electricity indefinitely interrupted. People went back to basics or got creative to learn about their loved ones and begin rebuilding.
"It's horrible. It's things you take for granted that aren't there anymore," said Jack Cleveland, 50, of Henryville, a Census Bureau worker.
In many cases, word-of-mouth is replacing the conversations that would usually happen by cell phone or e-mail.
Randy Mattingly, a 24-year-old mechanic, said he and his neighbors passed on information by word-of-mouth to make sure people were OK: "It was like, `Hey, did you talk to this guy?'" He said state police quickly set up two gathering points for adults and children, at the church and at a nearby community center.
At Sunday's mass, Father Steve Schaftlein turned the church into an information exchange, asking the 100 or so in attendance to stand up and share information. Immediately, volunteers stood to share tips about functioning in what is in many ways a tech-free zone.
Lisa Smith, who has been Henryville's postmaster for six weeks, told people that they could pick up their mail in Scottsburg, about 10 miles north. She said she was most worried about people needing medication and she had been shaking boxes to see if they had pills inside with hopes of connecting them to their recipients.
A local insurance agent, Lyn Murphy-Carter, shared another story. The founder of her agency, 84-year-old Tom Murphy, had told her always to keep paper records. That proved valuable without access to computers. She collected about 1,000 claims Saturday alone, and was gathering handwritten claims from policyholders at church.
In West Liberty, Ky., about 85 miles east of Lexington, loss of technology led to a confusing and stressful aftermath for Doris Shuck, who was cleaning her house when the storm approached. She grabbed her laptop, cell phone and iPod and put them in a tote bag to bring down to the basement. The storms took her home, leaving only the basement and front porch. Huge piles of debris and mattresses were strewn in the back yard.
"I could hear the glass and hear the wood breaking. I just thought the house is going to fall on top of me," she said. She had scrapes and bruises.
After the storm passed, she received a text message from her mother, 70 miles away in Prestonsburg, but couldn't reply.
"I was just trying to figure out what had happened and get my thoughts together and my phone beeped and I looked and it was from my mom. I couldn't answer it," Shuck said. She went to the hospital where she works, but there was no Internet access there, either.
She reunited with her husband and daughter at the hospital and left for Prestonsburg to let her mother know they were OK. But they didn't know her parents were on their way to West Liberty at the same time.
"We had no way to communicate that to each other. We're so used to our cell phones and instant messaging. We didn't have any of that."
Her parents asked a state fish and wildlife officer to go to their home. The officer eventually found Doris Shuck's name on a list at the hospital for people who were accounted for.
While it could be days before power and cell service are fully restored to the damaged areas, crews were making progress Sunday. In Indiana, about 2,800 homes were without power, down from 8,000 in the hours after the storms. But in some hard-hit areas, like Henryville, a substation and transmission lines need to be rebuilt, and that could take up to a week.
Almost 19,000 customers were without power in Kentucky, according to the state's Public Service Commission, and a few thousand more from municipal utilities and TVA, which the PSC does not track.
Cell phone companies were trying to help residents by setting up mobile charging stations and email stations so they could communicate while power and cell service was still difficult to find.
Even with life upended in so many ways, one family got a reminder that even a deadly tornado can't uproot everything.
The home that Shalonda Kerr shares with her husband and Jack Russell terrier outside of Chelsea, Ind., was obliterated: The front wall was ripped clean, leaving the home looking eerily like a shaken dollhouse. An upended couch and a tipped-over fish tank lay in the rubble.
The mailbox was untouched. Its front hatch was tipped open, revealing a white piece of paper.
"Inside was a $300 IRS bill," Kerr said, laughing amid the ruins.
(ALSO)
A string of violent storms demolished small towns in Indiana and cut off rural communities in Kentucky as an early season tornado outbreak killed more than 30 people, and the death toll rose as daylight broke on Saturday's search for survivors.
Massive thunderstorms, predicted by forecasters for days, threw off dozens of tornadoes as they raced Friday from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes. Twisters crushed blocks of homes, knocked out cellphones and landlines, ripped power lines from broken poles and tossed cars, school buses and tractor-trailers onto roads made impassable by debris.
Weather that put millions of people at risk killed at least 32 in four states _ Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio _ but both the scale of the devastation and the breadth of the storms made an immediate assessment of the havoc's full extent all but impossible.
In Kentucky, the National Guard and state police headed out to search wreckage for an unknown number of missing. In Indiana, authorities searched dark county roads connecting rural communities that officials said "are completely gone."
In Henryville, the birthplace of Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Colonel Harland Sanders, volunteers pushed shopping carts full of water and food down littered streets, handing supplies to anyone in need. Hundreds of firefighters and police zipped around town, where few recognizable structures remained; all of Henryville's schools were destroyed. Wind had blown out the windows of the Henryville Community Presbyterian Church and gutted the building.
"It's all gone," said Andy Bell, who was guarding a friend's demolished service garage, not far from where a school bus stuck out from the side of a restaurant and a parking lot where a small classroom chair jutted from a car window.
"It was beautiful," he said, looking around at the town of about 2,000 north of Louisville, Ky. "And now it's just gone. I mean, gone."
Susie Renner, 54, said she saw two tornadoes barreling down on Henryville within minutes of each other. The first was brown from being filled with debris; the second was black.
"I'm a storm chaser," Renner said, "and I have never been this frightened before."
A baby was found in a field in Salem, about 10 miles north of New Pekin, where her family lives, said Melissa Richardson, spokeswoman at St. Vincent Salem Hospital, where the little girl was initially taken.
The child was in critical condition Saturday at a hospital in Louisville, Ky., and authorities were still trying to figure out how she ended up alone in the field, Richardson said. She said she couldn't identify the child or her family.
Friday's tornado outbreak came two days after an earlier round of storms killed 13 people in the Midwest and South, and forecasters at the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center had said the day would be one of a handful this year that warranted its highest risk level. By 10 p.m., the weather service had issued 269 tornado warnings. Only 189 warnings were issued in all of February.
"We knew this was coming. We were watching the weather like everyone else," said Clark County, Ind., Sheriff Danny Rodden. "This was the worst case scenario. There's no way you can prepare for something like this."
Fourteen people were reported killed in Indiana, including four in Chelsea, where a man, woman and their 4-year-old great-grandchild died in one house. Tony Williams, owner of the Chelsea General Store, said the child and mother were huddled in a basement when the storm hit and sucked the 4-year-old out her hands. The mother survived, but her 70-year-old grandparents were upstairs; both died.
"They found them in the field, back behind the house," Williams said.
Two people died further north in Holton, where it appeared a tornado cut a diagonal swath down the town's tiny main drag, demolishing a cinderblock gas station but leaving a tiny white church intact down the road.
"We are going to continue to hit every county road that we know of that there are homes on and search those homes," said Indiana State Police Sgt. Jerry Goodin. "We have whole communities and whole neighborhoods that are completely gone. We've had a terrible, terrible tragedy here."
The death toll rose to at least 14 in Kentucky, where National Guard troops and Kentucky State Police troopers were dispatched along with a rescue team to counties east and south of Lexington.
In West Liberty, Ky., Stephen Burton heard the twister coming and pulled his 23-year-old daughter to safety, just before the tornado destroyed the second story of the family's home.
"I held onto her and made it to the center of the house, next to a closet," Burton said. "I just held onto her, and I felt like I was getting sand-blasted on my back."
Endre Samu, public affairs officer for the Kentucky State Police in Morehead, said three people died in West Liberty and at least 75 were injured. With the hospital damaged in the storm, some patients were being transferred to area hospitals, he said.
"All of the downtown area was just devastated," Samu said.
Tornadoes were reported in at least six Ohio cities and towns, including the village of Moscow, where a council member found dead in her home was one of at least three people killed in the state. Several dozen homes were damaged, some stripped down to their foundations, and the Clermont County commissioners called a state of emergency for the first time in 15 years.
One person was reported dead Saturday in Alabama. Emergency Management Agency spokeswoman Yasamie August said an apparent tornado that hit Jackson Gap injured two others as well. She didn't have more details.
Emergency officials in Lee County, Va., said damage from a possible tornado left a two- to three-mile path of destruction that may reach far into Tennessee, and damage reports were expected to increase with daylight.
"We don't know. We can't get down there," Emergency Management Director Jason Crabtree said of areas stretching south of the Virginia line. "This thing may be eight to 10 miles long."
Isa 47:3- Thy nakedness shall be uncovered, yea, thy shame shall be seen: I will take vengeance, and I will not meet [thee as] a man.
Psa 83:15- So persecute them with thy tempest, and make them afraid with thy storm.
Psa 83:16- Fill their faces with shame; that they may seek thy name, O LORD.
Psa 83:17- Let them be confounded and troubled for ever; yea, let them be put to shame, and perish:
Isa 28:2- Behold, the Lord hath a mighty and strong one, [which] as a tempest of hail [and] a destroying storm, as a flood of mighty waters overflowing, shall cast down to the earth with the hand.
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