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It's been six months after an F4 tornado passed a mile and a half away from my parents house (the Green Pin). I was with them that night, and this is the story of our lengthy and circuitous trip to check on my grandmother (the Blue Pin) who wouldn't answer her phone. (Yes, she now has a hearing aid) I went out to visit my parents last Sunday, and I snapped some pictures to let you see what things look like now. Some people have been able to rebuild, some chose not to rebuild, and others are still in the process.
This area is fairly rural, and the lasting damage was done to the landscape. Trees were splintered and snapped in half. You can clearly see the path of the tornado as you wind through the roads bordering Tennesse and Georgia on the way to my parents.
The land around this house had to be completely cleared away. There was no clear cutting, or taking the timber for lumber. The twisted trees are not structurly sound enough to be used for that purpose. Most of the scattered trees were burned in months of brush fires. What was not burned was only suitable to be chipped and made into pulpwood. The house is being rebuilt to match the previous layout and style, and they're making progress. This picture barely shows the RV parked in the driveway. This family has not been able to move back into their home.
A trailer identical to the one brought in here was in thrown up and into a tree during the tornado. That is left of this tree can be seen in the far left of this picture. Maybe because it was such an obvious total loss, and the structure so easy to replace, but this was the first home in the neighborhood that the family was able to move in to. Everything around them was a complete mess, and they also lived in an RV but they were able to move into the new mobile home within a few months.
The mobile home here was the scariest part of the drive after the tornado. It was thrown across the road, and up the hill from this slab. The shower, water heater, toilet, were all literally scattered on the hill. This was something you saw and immediately felt that no one could survive. Luckily no fatalities were reported at this address.The area is recovering, but the scars will show for at least the next 2-4 years.
So scary!! I remember watching the coverage live of the ones going thru Alabama on the weather channel.
ReplyDeleteWow, this is really scary to see the harsh reality of what happened. Natural disasters are really scary to me. It must be really sad and devastating to see a house thrown and appliances scattered about the property.
ReplyDeletePhats: It was the same supercell that hit the university of Alabama that caused this tornado.
ReplyDeleteWendy: Seeing the scattered appliances was surreal. It's crazy to think that mother nature was the cause. The blessing in disguise was that this is a rural community, and the fatalities were less numerous than if the tornado path had been 5 miles north.