‘Build with us.’ W. Ky. leaders start to imagine next steps after tornado disaster
It’s 2 p.m. on Monday and Mayfield Mayor Kathy O’Nan has, by her own count, cried 37 times.
She finally opened office mail today, and one letter had a check for $10,000, and another for $23. The big check was great, but the $23 one broke her down again.
“It just touched me,” she said, the tears welling up again. “Can you imagine the heart of that person? People have run toward us giving us everything we could possibly need, plus their hearts.”
It’s been 10 days since tornadoes savaged Mayfield, and now that O’Nan is finally able to get some sleep, she thinks a lot about heart. About the man she just hugged who lost two family members, but still pronounced himself blessed. About the thousands of people who have sent tools and water and money. About hundreds more who have come to Mayfield to repair the shattered town and help some battered hearts. About Mayfield itself, a town she adopted more than 30 years ago.
“We don’t have many tragedies,” she said sitting inside the girls’ locker room at Mayfield High School, the place she taught for 20 years that’s now a central supply depot. “But we come together and get through it.”
O’Nan, 68 is small, feisty and warm; she seems to know everyone in town, and thanks to national television, a lot more people know her. But that window is closing, she realizes.
“When Christmas is over, it will get cold and we know we won’t be in the spotlight any more,” she said. “The national attention will go away.”
But there’s no question about rebuilding. O’Nan wants to talk to people from Joplin, Missouri, and Greensburg, Kansas, about how they came back. “It’s time to get it right,” she said. We’re already talking about zoning and what we want it to look like because it’s a clean slate.”
The war zone that Mayfield resembles is indeed a clean slate; O’Nan will need urban planners and architects and lots and lots of money. Right now, the city doesn’t even have a building inspector. Two more worries: Many of those affected are renters, now dependent on the whims of landlords as to whether or how quickly things get fixed up. And how can people rebuild without jobs to help them pay for it?
“We need to tell the world, you can come here and build with us,” she said.
For now, she spends half her time on city business, and half meeting with officials from FEMA and state Emergency Management over steps that have to be taken day by day. Schools will reopen, she believes. I think it’s so important to get our kids back in a routine, this is very traumatic for all of us, but especially for our children.
Her political career is forged in the fire of crisis. After 16 years on city council, this is her first term as mayor, and her third year. So the first year she learned about the job, the second was COVID-19 and the third was this. She had already announced that she would run for a second term, and she wants to win. “I hope I get to see this rebuilding through.”
It’s just day by day at this point, and O’Nan says she hopes people will remember Mayfield in six weeks, or six months.
“The donations are wonderful, but it is the heart and the prayers that mean the most. We feel it, we feel their prayers and their support.”
‘Will they come back?’
The issue of whether these small towns can survive is one that Gov. Andy Beshear brought up briefly at a Tuesday toy drive. If people really want to help, then come locate a factory at a place like Dawson Springs.
Otherwise, Beshear said, “the concern for a place like Dawson is will they come back?”
It’s a matter of perspective, certainly, but in some ways, Dawson Springs looks even harder hit than Mayfield. Perhaps it’s because the town is built on a ridge, and when you’re at the top, all you see is the ruins where people used to live. About 75 percent of the town’s residences were destroyed, and as others have described, many of them simply disappeared. One house’s remains were a shallow basement, a purple basketball lying next to a water heater. Trees are ragged stumps. Piles of debris are growing. One house lost its roof, but a mirror is still attached to the wall, reflecting the blue sky.
“Our town is gone, it’s just gone,” said Brad Shuck, a former Dawson Springs resident who came to volunteer with the Well of Redemption Church. “The tornado took more than houses. It took people’s history and heritage away too.”
Many will rebuild anyway, and they will need lots of help for a long, long time.
That help is there right now. Mr. Rodgers told children in bad situations to “look for the helpers,” and in Western Kentucky, they’re in sight all the time. Treffle Beaupre had driven up from Spartanburg, S.C. to see his kids in Paducah, and decided to help out at the Mayfield Fair Grounds, where food and generators are being handed out. And diapers. So many diapers. “We just thought we should be here.”
Pat Pearce of Owenton has been living in her truck at the Mayfield Fair Grounds for the past week. Her own house was hit twice by tornadoes, and she remembers how much people helped her.
She plans on staying through Christmas because “that’s when they’ll be most shorthanded.”
Then she wants to go help small farmers clean debris out of their fields before the next growing season.
“I just couldn’t stay at home, so I decided to drive down,” she said.
It’s awe-inspiring, really, the food trucks and dump trucks and pickup trucks full of supplies. On one Mayfield corner, a church group from Missouri was handing out burgers, on another a Baptist church from Alabama was offering prayers.
As Beshear said: “You can feel the love from all over the country.”
This story was originally published December 23, 2021 at 7:50 AM.
