Henryville, regroups after tornado

As snowflakes fell on the ruined homes and businesses Sunday, many residents gathered in the parking lot of St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church.

Few people have power, so they hunched around propane fueled heaters, drinking hot coffee and eating eggs scrambled on an outdoor grill.

Two days after his home was severely damaged by the tornado that devastated the town, trucker Charles Boughton was not bowed by the work ahead.

“We’ll be fine,” said Boughton, 43. “We’ll make it happen.”

The tornadoes that ripped across much of the Midwest and South on Friday killed an estimated 40 people in five states, 22 of them in Kentucky and 13 in Indiana, including a 15-month-old toddler who had survived the same tornado that killed her parents and two siblings, according to the Courier-Journal in Louisville. Angela Babcock had been found in a field near her southern Indiana home, and died Sunday afternoon of a traumatic brain injury, the Courier-Journal reports. The deaths also included three in Ohio and one each in Alabama and Georgia. Death numbers, however, fluctuated Sunday, and Kentucky Emergency Management was reporting 21 people died in that state. The National Weather Service said the four twisters in Kentucky were the worst in the region in 24 years. The most severe damage appeared centered in small towns in southern Indiana and eastern Kentucky’s Appalachian foothills.

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear formally requested an expedited major disaster declaration, and that move will get assessment and assistance teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency into communities more quickly, Beshear said at a news conference in Frankfort, Ky., on Sunday.

The country’s freakishly warm weather may have played a role in this early-season tornado outbreak.

“This year’s unusually mild winter has led to ocean temperatures across the Gulf of Mexico that are approximately 1 degrees C (1.8 F) above average,” says meteorologist Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground. This places it among the top ten warmest values on record for this time of year, going back to the 1800s, he says.

The preliminary tornado count for this outbreak is 74, says Weather Channel tornado expert Greg Forbes. If the final number is higher, it would be a record for the month of March, Forbes says.

In Henryville, an EF-4 tornado — the second-highest on the Fujita scale that measures tornadic force — brought 175-mph winds and stayed on the ground for more than 50 miles.

Two days later, all the talk was of the future. And of rebuilding.

Andrew Moore, 46, said he lost an addition to his 1910 house. “Lost three cars, lost part of the house,” he said. “Got the family.”

Inside St. Francis during Sunday Mass, the only light came from candles on the altar and pale sunlight coming through stained glass windows. There was no power and no heat.

The congregation of about 150 people compared notes about damage to their homes, the safety of their families.

Margaret Short, 62, said it was important to pray together “because we’re a small community and this is our church and we have so much to be thankful for.”

Tears fell as she spoke of her own family’s scary moments Friday — her daughter took shelter in a closet — and the generosity of her neighbors and church family.

Gesturing at the pile of donated items, she said, “It’s not remarkable. This is normal in our community.”

Steve Schaftlein, the parish priest, described driving into town after the tornado. When he saw the intact cross atop the steeple, he said, he knew “we were still here, we had meaning, and we had purpose.”

In his sermon, he said, “We can choose how we are going to frame this experience. We can choose to begin anew.”

In Chelsea, about a 25-minute drive northeast of Henrysville, there was ample warning before “a bomb went off” that destroyed Annette Cartwright’s home and barn on Friday, she says.

A fire truck stopped outside the house to warn her mother-in-law, daughter and son-in-law, who were outside watching the approaching storm.

“They told them to get inside,” says Cartwright, 40, who was at work.

Local TV stations also were sounding alarms, she says. “They kept saying ‘this is really bad,’” she recalls. “The warnings saved three lives at my house.”

Chelsea, an unincorporated area that’s more a sprawling neighborhood than a town, has no warning sirens, Cartwright says, as do most nearby towns. “We can sometimes hear the ones in New Washington,” she says.

Word of the likelihood of bad weather had been on the news for a couple days, Cartwright says. “If you didn’t realize something was coming, there’s something wrong with you.”

Retiree Jim Gray, 62, who also lives in Chelsea, had enough warning to pick up his 6-year-old grandson from school Friday. The boy ended up in the basement of Gray’s home, which was not damaged.

“Everybody knew it was coming,” says Gray, who first heard about the potential for tornados on Wednesday. “They kept saying, ‘It’s going to be a bad one,’” he said.

The subject of the warning system came up during a Saturday evening National Weather Service briefing in Henryville, during which the agency’s Joe Sullivan called the advance notice of the storms “a great success of the entire warning program.”