Tornado aftermath shows us Greensboro residents that we are strong

April 21--GREENSBORO -- One minute, they're polishing off the Sunday dinner Angelina Gill made for her family -- a roast and broccoli casserole.

The next, a sharp whistle and they're ... are they outside now? Is that why their clothes feel so heavy with rain? But they were just ... why is there glass and insulation and drywall on the floor? Where's the kitchen? What's that smell? Gas?

Gill opens her mouth to scream. Nothing comes out.

And so it went April 15, just after 5 o'clock, in dozens of northeast Greensboro homes like Gill's rental on Oak Grove Avenue. Couldn't have taken more than 5 minutes from start to finish. From Hampton to Heath, Dudley Heights to Lincoln Heights -- winds swirling, trees toppling, houses collapsing.

Thirty-seven structures destroyed, another 162 nearly so. Hundreds of people displaced, including students from three elementary schools who will finish out the school year in unfamiliar classrooms.

Consider Gill, her husband, her 20-year-old son. A massive white oak split their home in two. A week later, they have no permanent address, no clothes, no furniture, no renter's insurance with which to replace their belongings.

Gill considers herself lucky.

The vortex spared a sliver of the kitchen where they crouched under a table made of glass. Made. Of. Glass. And no one was hurt.

The house didn't explode, despite the gas leak.

Greensboro firefighters even found her Jack Russell terrier, Sashi, hiding under a bed.

All things considered, she says, it could have been worse.

There's a name for that perspective:

Greensboro Strong.

Surely you've seen the phrase in the past seven days, maybe as a hashtag on social media, or on those green T-shirts everyone's wearing.

Here, it's not some generic marketing slogan -- "(Insert-your-city-here) Strong."

It means something in Greensboro.

Greensboro Strong means we count our blessings even in our darkest times, just like Gill is counting hers.

Oh, it still hurts. Over on Bessemer Avenue, Bethy Dwyer cut short a trip to her native Venezuela to survey damage to her home, now covered with glass and mud.

Front windows, shattered. Overhead lights, ripped. Her refrigerator sits on the wrong side of the room, the back walls disconnected from the foundation.

Tormenta. That's the Spanish word for the thing that disrupted her life.

"I cried," Dwyer, a housekeeper, says of the moment she unlocked the front door. "I needed crying. It was very emotional.

"But then I calmed down for a couple of minutes and thought, 'This is marginal. My life is good. My family is good.'"

Her hope? That her insurance company provides enough money to start over, rather than ordering her to rebuild a house with little worth saving.

Here's a question: Why there? Why Dwyer's street, and Gill's street, and not other streets lined with people of means, where paying $1,000 deductibles would be an inconvenience rather than an impediment?

That's not to say their losses would be any less tragic. Nor is it to imply the residents somehow deserve such a fate because of their good fortunes.

But it would be different, surmountable, even.

Franky Batten, Duke Energy's maintenance manager in the Triad, has dealt with hundreds of storms, and he says he is always amazed at how certain parts of the city absorb the brunt of the damage.

Whether your house or your neighborhood gets hit might be determined by something so basic as the surrounding terrain. Batten says he has noticed that tornadoes seem to track streams, even small ones.

But beyond the affected neighborhoods, life goes on as though the storm never happened, making it hard for people to imagine how difficult it is in the epicenter.

"A city the size of Greensboro, they don't see it on their street or neighborhood. So they're almost oblivious to what's happening," Batten says.

"Riding around other parts of the city, you'd never know anything had happened."

It can't be true, since storms don't think or feel. But it sure seems like this one had an agenda: taking from communities with the least to give.

The neighborhoods on either side of Phillips Avenue, where this so-called EF2 unleashed the bulk of its fury, are among the city's poorest, their growth frustrated by generational poverty and lackluster opportunity.

Districts 1 and 2 are home to the city's "food deserts," where residents struggle to find food that's healthy and affordable. Median income is too low. Crime is too high. Many people in these mostly black districts -- represented by Greensboro City Councilwomen Sharon Hightower and Goldie Wells, respectively -- live below the poverty line.

The residents are poor. But they're not helpless. For five or six days, they had no power. But they were not powerless.

Before the citywide fundraisers and food drives, before city-operated shuttles deposited volunteers to clean up debris -- east Greensboro rescued east Greensboro.

On Monday morning, 12 or so hours in, many affected areas remained islands, their roads blocked by downed trees and power lines. The Rev. Cardes Brown was aching to open his New Light Missionary Baptist to the community.

The big church on Willow Road sits near ground zero of the devastation, and boasts a kitchen large enough to feed the masses.

But the church was without power.

Brown called another longtime stalwart in the African-American community: Guilford County Commissioner Melvin "Skip" Alston, a leader with whom Brown has sometimes disagreed and disagreed publicly.

Brown asked: Does the county have a generator big enough to power up this kitchen?

No, Alston replied, but maybe we can find one.

With the help of Guilford County Manager Marty Lawing, Alston got the church a rental. And much like Jesus with the loaves and fishes, the people ate.

Here's the thing: New Light is not even in Alston's district.

Greensboro Strong? How about East Greensboro Strong?

That's not to say these storm-ravaged neighborhoods don't want or need help from other parts of Greensboro.

It will take everyone, and then some, to recover. Which is why Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan, outfitted in a "Greensboro Strong" shirt and skinny jeans, traveled the city end-to-end in search of donations for the tornado relief fund.

That includes the N.C. A&T board of visitors, where she slipped a blue blazer over her green tee before addressing the group.

One unexpected problem that cropped up last week? The sheer number of people aching to do something -- anything -- to help strangers who were hurting.

Early on, local government officials struggled to corral volunteers, begging them to work through the city's command center to keep traffic to a minimum.

City Councilwoman Michelle Kennedy, who also runs the Interactive Resource Center, posted a plea on her Facebook page:

"Ya'll, this is coming from a place of gratitude and love -- NO MORE BOTTLED WATER! Literally, our cups runneth over! All areas currently have all the water they can use right now."

By week's end, the Volunteer Center of Greensboro issued a dire warning:

"We strongly discourage people from going out with their chain saws and power tools," Hope Tyler said. "There still may be live power lines tangled up in trees that might be very dangerous."

The city's collective nervous energy is all well and good. But the looming crisis will take more than a Saturday afternoon spent collecting debris.

Longtime affordable housing advocate Beth McKee-Huger dodged mounting piles of debris last week as she maneuvered her car through the Cottage Grove neighborhood off English Street, where damage ranged from lost shingles to missing roofs.

She watched families pick through belongings inside storm-mangled houses, hoping to salvage something to take to their new homes.

Where are all these people going to live?

Greensboro lacked affordable housing long before last Sunday evening, McKee-Huger says. Costs are rising even as income remains steady. And single-family home ownership, outside of programs like Habitat for Humanity, remain out of reach for many.

"It's an absolute disaster because we already had this enormous shortage of places that people with limited income could afford," she says. "As a community we're going to have to take some really drastic measures."

Solutions to those problems will come in due time. But what of Gill, who lost so much last week but counts herself so blessed?

She can't wait to decorate her family's new home, wherever that may be.

There's a hashtag for that.

#greensborostrong

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