'There's no place to go': Kentucky tornado survivors take refuge at state park
Just 10 miles separate Paula Young and her neighbors from their flattened homes and the rubble they climbed out of in Dawson Springs, a southwest Kentucky community hard-hit by the tornadoes.
In a matter of hours following a series of tornadoes in Western Kentucky, nearby Pennyrile Forest State Resort Park shifted from a peaceful park decorated for the holidays to a bustling shelter for survivors. With its stunning views and picturesque lake, this park has always been an oasis for travelers and guests.
Now it is a temporary home for more than 100 tornado survivors.
In a place like Dawson Springs, everybody knows everyone. That didn’t change last weekend when a tornado bulldozed through the town of 2,500, crumpling rooftops like old hamburger wrappers and smashing homes like empty soda cans. As of Thursday, Hopkins County officials had tallied 14 deaths in the community and one person still on their missing persons list. More than 600 people have been displaced.
Ask anyone in town and they’ll tell you the third of a mile stretch on U.S. 62 “from the Minit Mart to the Dairy Queen is all gone.” A storage unit business was dismantled during the tornado, and belongings swirled together like paint. Fragments of people’s lives were strewn about the streets. Every rain-stained doll, old cassette tape, mangled shirt and shattered Christmas ornament once had places they belonged. Now they didn’t.
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The storm ravaged much of the town's low-income housing and left a whole neighborhood obliterated. Many of the neighbors, however, are still together, scattered among the lodges and cabins in this peaceful park.
“We’re pretty much all right here, and it’s kind of comforting,” Young said. “You’re surrounded with your people, and you’re wondering, who made it and who didn’t.”
As she spoke, she counted the lots in her neighborhood as though she could still see them – the home across from hers, to the side of hers, and even the lady to side of that one, and another a little further down.
She learned Monday that one man on her street had died. A few others had left town to stay with family members, but several of her neighbors had been with her at the park since the night they lost everything.
“It’s comforting to look at everyone and know that we’re here, even if they don’t know what we’re doing,” Young said. “We’re here. Thank God for that.”
Every person has a story
Remarkably, park manager Melisa Voges slept through the storm but awoke around 1 a.m. to hear the park ranger rapping at her door. The power was out in town; her phones were dead, and the damage in Dawson Springs was unthinkable. The ranger needed a safe place to transport busloads of survivors who were gathering at the town’s school, and Pennyrile had a large multipurpose room.
Many people in the community had nothing but the nightclothes they were wearing.
Several had waded through the destruction barefoot.
Knowing the park only had so much to offer, she grabbed several pairs of socks from her own dresser drawers and left to help.
By the time light hit the sky that morning, Voges had checked survivors into every cabin. Many of them were her own staff. At least eight of her 30 employees lost everything.
Horse trailers filled with supplies began appearing in the parking lot early Saturday morning. Pennyrile’s cozy lodge that usually serves as a restaurant looked more like a Walmart with piles of diapers, toiletries, clothes, shoes and blankets.
Christmas trees, garlands and wreaths lingered in the background among windows that looked out over an immaculate lake — a reminder that this is usually a vacation spot instead of a refuge.
Even at the park, though, the survivors couldn't escape the nightmarish terror of Friday night, when their roofs and dreams were ripped apart, leaving their futures to hang in an uncertain balance.
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Every person at Pennyrile has a story. The whole community of Dawson Springs seemingly either helped with the rescuing or needed to be rescued.
Those raw memories linger behind their eyes as they watch television in their rooms to pass the time. They resurface in between bites over catfish and roast in the dining room.
Three of Carlyn Morrow's grandchildren were sleeping through a showing of "Frosty The Snowman" in her room at Pennyrile on Monday as she recalled her incredible survival.
She was in her living room and remembered her daughter barking at her to come to the bathroom as the storm whirled outside. It wasn’t until the second time her daughter hollered that Morrow actually retreated. Within two minutes, the tornado had arrived, and a car flew into the living room where Morrow had been.
She credits her daughter, Samantha, her "hero," with saving her life.
Morrow and her family were quickly transported to Dawson Springs High School early that Saturday morning, and were then driven — by a first responder in a Gator utility vehicle — to Pennyrile, where officials say they can stay until at least the day after Christmas.
Morrow hopes for even longer. After that, she's not sure what they'll do. She was also displaced during a tornado in Alabama in 2011 and as recently as this year was homeless in Dawson Springs, her hometown.
If one of her daughters, who has seven children, has her apartment's power restored, staying there may be the best option.
“Dawson is completely, pretty much gone,” Morrow said. “There’s nothing. There’s no place to go.”
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Sammy Webb, 50, who was Morrow's neighbor before the storm, likes to spend his afternoons at Pennyrile sitting in his wheelchair in the doorway.
Although he had "Jeopardy!" on TV in his room Monday, he prefers the outdoor walkway so he can greet those who pass by. He wore a University of Illinois hoodie, which, like his black sweatpants and white socks, were not originally his. He’d received them after surviving the tornado.
During the storm, trees crashed through the walls and he feared he’d fall through an open window. He was trapped.
He estimated that he was stuck in the madness for 15 terrible minutes before being rescued, but the experience has lasted much longer.
“I have nightmares,” he said. “I don’t sleep at night. I’m constantly watching the skies for more storms coming by. (When) the storm was over with, all I could hear was people hollering and screaming and crying for help.”
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A vacation spot turned refuge
Most of the guests stay inside their rooms, said Voges, the park manager, and only venture out to “shop” through the supplies or grab meals from the buffet to bring back to their cabins.
The donations have taken up so much of the common space, there aren’t many tables where people can sit and visit.
At first glance, it’s hard to tell the difference between the survivors and the volunteers. Some of the displaced have chipped in their time sorting donations just to keep busy. Some of the volunteers have homes to go back to, but they don’t have power and water. Community members trickle in and out of the park, too, looking for a hot meal.
The whole town is grieving and trying to put itself back together.
The park doesn’t turn anyone away.
Virginia Tucker sat in the dining room earlier this week picking at potatoes and green beans as her eyes welled with tears. She and her husband still had their home, and they were blessed. Her nephew’s house had been leveled. Her hairdresser had been injured in the storm and was on a ventilator.
When that woman woke up, she was going to learn her fiancé died, Tucker said.
Everywhere you looked in Dawson Springs, someone’s heart seemed to be breaking.
Still, amid all the sadness and questions about what comes next, volunteers at the park had arranged activities like hikes, making ornaments and playing games. At one point a park official even brought out a long corn snake for the children to hold and wrap around their neck. With a list of the day's events tacked onto the doorway at the lodge, it almost felt like a children's camp as the sun glistened over the park in the unseasonably warm December weather.
Even so, most of the 20 or so young survivors chose to stay close to their parents.
Debra Koelm, 23, is staying at the lodge with her family, including her sister and 2-year-old niece, each of whom was thrown from their home by the tornado and buried in dirt before being rescued.
That little girl awoke in the middle of the night Sunday, pleading with her family, “I wanna go back home. I don’t wanna lose my home.”
“It broke me down,” Koelm said, while taking in the park's beauty from a viewpoint with her 4-year-old daughter, Marya. “I didn’t know what to say. All I could say was, ‘Baby girl, you don’t have a home. It’s gone. But you will get a new one eventually.’”
Eventually means something different for each survivor at the park.
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Small moments of joy
On the fourth day after the storm, Sherry Barnes sat on the small porch outside her room while her daughter, Breanna, 13, ran a brush through her hair. Her family is blessed. Their home still stands, even though it’s in that obliterated stretch between the Minit Mart and the Dairy Queen.
Part of the roof is gone, and the windows are shattered, but they have a starting point.
They can repair, rather than rebuild.
Typically Barnes works in the park’s pro shop, and for the past two days she’d been right in the thick of things, trying to connect her neighbors, friends and colleagues with the supplies and resources they need.
“If I sit around and think about things, I’m going to start crying,” she said. “I’m just worried about helping everyone else. I can be a shelter for everyone else, too.”
She’d spent Tuesday afternoon, though, talking with her insurance companies and arranging to meet with FEMA. Barnes was eager to get out of the family’s room at the resort so someone else who needed it could have it.
They'd only been living at the park a few days, but the cabins had already seen some turnover as families connected with friends and relatives in other towns. Each time a survivor moves on, another one moves in. Hopkins County officials, too, explained on Wednesday evening that the missing persons number is dropping, but it’s not because they’re finding bodies in the rubble. Many Dawson Springs residents have relocated and haven’t been able to get in touch with families. Survivors are turning up in shelters in other communities, at hotels and with family members.
Barnes and her daughter had taken shelter at the park ahead of the storm, and even they had trouble getting in touch with their extended family.
As she explained this, a few teenagers came walking down the sidewalk carrying grocery bags of clothes. Barnes' eyes lit up and her lips shifted into a big smile. She clearly recognized them.
“We’re all OK, everybody’s OK,” the young girl said. “Look who’s with me.”
Then in swift motion Barnes threw her arms around one of the teens.
“Hi baby!” she beamed with a shrill happiness. “Oh, I love you! Are you OK?!”
The girl, who was her niece’s daughter, explained that she was staying with her mama and that her "nanny" was in the hospital, but she was going to be OK. Then in a swirl of hugs that happened just as suddenly as the kids appeared, the teenagers left to deliver baby supplies to a mother in another cabin.
“That’s just kind of the way it is,” Barnes said, smiling as the kids left. “Because some people have cell phone service and some don’t. My family tried (for a while) to get ahold of us and couldn’t.”
These small, joyful reunions happen every time the townsfolk see someone they love, who they haven’t seen since everything in their lives changed.
Trauma was present in the park, but so was an incredible sense of resilience, gratitude, and yes, small moments of joy.
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'We don't have a house anymore'
By the end of Tuesday glee took over at the shelter in a storm of welcome sirens as the Morganfield Police escorted Santa Claus into Pennyrile.
Santa, police officers and a few elves unloaded four truckloads of toys on picnic tables near the park’s empty pool. Some of the volunteers, who were teachers at the town’s school, ushered the children from their cabins for a bit of holiday magic.
“He’s here, he’s here,” they cheered, as Santa ho ho ho’ed at the growing crowd of displaced children.
As they lined up, the adults whispered to the elves which toys they thought their students would like best. One girl, certainly, would need arts and crafts sets and another would want the baby doll and a stroller. A boy toward the front liked Transformers.
Santa called the children up in groups of siblings and passed them stacks of new toys so tall their little arms could barely carry them.
One little girl spoke seriously to Santa when the elves tried to give her gifts.
“We don’t have a house anymore,” she said.
He took a breath, and then he called an officer over to help him pray with that family.
Santa, whose actual name is Troy Black, lives in Union County now, but he grew up in Dawson Springs.
He knew this community. He knew this hurt.
That little girl’s pain had left him speechless.
The disaster he’d driven through on the way to the park wasn’t a scene in a movie, it was his hometown.
After the children wandered back to their cabins with new toys, even Santa needed to fight back some tears for Dawson Springs.
“Today you’re sitting here, you’re breathing and you’re alive,” he'd told the little girl. “And you may not have (your own) place over your head, but you’ve still got each other.”
Follow Maggie Menderski on Twitter at @MaggieMenderski and Hayes Gardner at @HayesGardner.