At a mobile home park near the London-Corbin airport on Monday, chainsaws whirred away at snapped tree limbs, augers drilled holes for new telephone poles and heavy machinery hummed as they pushed tornado debris into large piles.
Everyone with an able body was put to work, helping recover from a tornado that claimed the lives of nearly two dozen Kentuckians over the weekend and left others critically injured.
The National Weather Service confirmed a tornado capable of wind speeds as high as 165 miles per hour passed through Laurel County on Friday night. Survey teams are still assessing damage, the destruction of which could be seen from the air as a path extending from Russell to Laurel County. More severe weather is expected in the region this week.
Elementary school teacher Hope Hoskins was there in London on Monday too, along with a few of her fellow teachers. Donning boots and gloves, they simply walked up to damaged houses and asked how they could help. They don’t have any special construction skills, just a desire to help.
“[We are] going through stuff, finding personal belongings, I know people were specifically looking for jewelry boxes, phones, iPads, wallets, those types of things,” Hoskins said.
Hoskins said, helping just felt natural. Like many in the region, she couldn’t stand to sit by and do nothing while her neighbors suffer.
“That’s the thing about these hillbilly folk, they’ll come together when they need to,” she said with a laugh. “That’s the truth. There’s nothing like eastern Kentucky people, there really isn’t.”
Before long she was put to work by James and Jackie Couch, survivors who were digging through the rubble of their destroyed brick home, finding camping equipment to save.
James said, without cell phone push alerts from the National Weather Service late on Friday night, they wouldn’t be alive.
“We got one about 30 minutes before [the tornado] hit, and one about 30 seconds before it hit,” Couch said. “The second one, we dove into our bathroom tub. If not for those warnings, we would’ve been in our bedrooms which are under walls and brick now.”
But severe weather is on the way again on Tuesday, and there could be less warnings this time around.
“Somehow, the National Weather Service and NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] chose to do a systems upgrade that is currently going on and won’t be finished until Wednesday,” Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said in a Monday public service announcement. “That means your weather radio won’t work if you have one.”
Meanwhile, Beshear is hoping to get the green light from the White House for FEMA assistance. He’s urging everyone to document their damage, including serial numbers of appliances, in case individual assistance programs open up.
This story was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU in Kentucky and NPR.
