‘Always a memory.’ London tornado survivors rebuild, but some may not return
Tanya Hall is ready.
She’s so close to being able to move into her new house, she’s already gotten out the “Fall” and Christmas placards on the front porch amid bricks, bags of clothes, cooler, bins and a mini-fridge.
Like quite a few residents of Sunshine Hills, Hall has been living in a camper since the night of May 16, when an EF-4 tornado with 170-per-hour winds crested the hill where she’d lived for 12 years. In an instant, most of her house was destroyed.
Hall’s family was luckier than several of their neighbors, who were among the nine people in Sunshine Hills killed by the storm that night. That brings its own issues.
“There’s a lot of survivor’s guilt when you’re here every day,” Hall said. “I’ve gone away for a few days, and when you come back, it hits you all over again.”
But even with a long six months, she’s back, and now her new board and batten house is almost ready.
Unlike Hall, not everyone in Sunshine Hills is ready to come back. The neighborhood, which bore the brunt of the storm, is a patchwork of still-empty foundations, new construction and dead trees. The blue of the Tyvek wrapping on new construction combines with the blue of the many tarps still pinned over roofs and cars. Sprinkled in between are numerous for sale signs.
Many of those empty sites are where tragedy struck the hardest. Les Leatherman. Pamela Mason. Nancy Clem. Ray Cowan. June Fisher. Darlene Miller. Richard and Wanda McFalls. Sherri Smith. Their memories are still all around.
At Keith Clark’s house, workmen were busy replacing garage doors Monday, just days before Thanksgiving. New windows are already in place, but Clark is not sure if he’s coming back to live there.
“It’s been a nightmare,” he said. “My nerves are bad right now.
“It’s good to see the rebuilding, but most of us are reliving the nightmare every day,” Clark continued. “I’d say 85 percent of people have sold their lots off. Not many people are coming back. It’s always going to be a memory for us.”
The storm, which cut a 60-mile path from Russell County to Laurel, took 20 lives that night. In Sunshine Hills, according to survivors, the silence after the storm was suddenly filled with the screams that still haunt Hall and Clark.
Before the storm, Sunshine Hills was a pleasant London suburb of rolling hills, old trees, a creek and a nice mix of retirees and young families.
In the end, that’s what convinced Debbie and Terry Brock to rebuild. Their house was destroyed, except for the staircase and the bathtub they sheltered in that night.
“We owned the land, and it’s such a nice, safe place,” Debbie Brock said.
For the past six months, they lived with their son on the other side of London while workmen built their house. For the past few weeks, they’ve been overseeing the final details from a camper parked in the driveway. It’s almost ready, maybe not Thanksgiving ready, but definitely Christmas.
“We had so much help,” Debbie Brock said. “Everyone has been so kind.”
That’s a constant refrain around Sunshine Hills. Tanya Hall even says the Federal Emergency Management Agency was great, along with the U.S. Small Business Administration, which handed out the loans for rebuilding.
Gov. Andy Beshear’s office said in July, the SBA approved $12.6 million in federal disaster loans to support Kentucky businesses, nonprofits, homeowners and renters after the storm. The Team Kentucky relief fund paid for all 20 funerals.
Hall is a state worker who would now like to retire with the disability of diagnosed PTSD. She knows trauma too well: For 11 years, she investigated child abuse accusations. When that became too much, she started answering the government hotline for children and adults.
“Since the tornado, it’s very difficult to deal with more trauma,” said Hall, who was wearing a sweatshirt that reads “Thankful, Grateful, Blessed.”
She is grateful to the people who rescued her furniture and have held it since the storm. She’s also grateful to her brother, Charles Hall, who has driven every day from Williamsburg to oversee the construction of her new house. But she will be most grateful on the day she moves in.
And the day after that, she will hire the workmen to dig a brand-new storm shelter.
