‘We’ve Got Each Other’: Indiana Neighbors Help One Another After Tornado

When the tornado picked up Mary Ellen Smith's mobile home, Adria Sims said it felt like hitting the top of a hill on a roller coaster -- a sudden, unsettling sense of weightlessness.

It lasted only seconds, if that, before the trailer slammed back to the ground. Sims and Smith, the mother of Sims' boyfriend, waited a few moments before pulling back the curtain of the shower in which they had been hiding. Instead of the bathroom, they saw a tree, which had crashed right through the roof and into the bathroom, missing their hiding spot by mere feet.

It's a wonder the tree didn't kill them -- but it also might be the thing that saved them, Sims said.

She firmly believes that the tree pinned down the mobile home northwest of Ellettsville and kept the tornado from blowing it away. The tornado that moved Smith's Chafin Chapel Road home, ripped up trees, destroyed several other structures in the county and damaged many more was one of three tornadoes to touch down in the south-central Indiana area on Saturday, June 15. Andrew White, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Indianapolis, said the tornado started west of Ellettsville and carved a 3.7-mile path north of the town, with a width of 400 yards and a top windspeed of about 130 miles per hour. It was on the ground for about 10 minutes, White said, and clocked in as an EF-2.

An EF-1 tornado was also reported in Owen County between the towns of Freedom and Spencer; while an EF-2 in eastern Greene County damaged 70 homes and knocked out power for an estimated 900 people.

Sims' experience of the tornado, from the time she helped Smith safely into the bathtub to the time they pushed back the curtain to find a tree in the house, was about two minutes long, she said. The immediate aftermath was silence, strange and still, as they blinked out at the property Smith had lived on nearly all her life and which was now barely recognizable. The trees that had shaded the property for decades had fallen into an impassible labyrinth.

Sims had lived through one other tornado before the one that hit the trailer on Saturday, but she'd never experienced anything like this. As a great nature lover, she's normally not afraid of the great outdoors, but the aftermath of the cyclone was sobering to say the least.

"We have our good days and our bad days," she said. "This was a bad day."

On Sunday, Sims picked her way through the debris of her boyfriend's former family home. She had no idea where some of the debris had come from -- sheets of aluminum wrapped around bent or broken tree trunks, an errant "school bus" sign. With help from friends and neighbors, Cory Smith hacked at the trees obstructing his mother's property. Sims and Smith had spent the night in their cars and woke at 5 a.m. to start working.

Mary Ellen Smith wasn't on the property on Sunday afternoon, but her sister, Judy Arthur, stopped by with her husband. She stared sorrowfully at the remnants of her childhood home, and all her family had lost.

But no one had been hurt, Sims said. Even the dogs had made it through, though they flatly refused to come out from under the home. As friends and family helped clear debris, they were even able to laugh a little with each other, spirits buoyed by gratitude or adrenaline or both.

"We'll get through," Sims said. "We've got each other. I tell them we've got to just stay strong."

The sense of community runs strong on West Chafin Chapel Road. Up and down the muddy, debris-carpeted road lined with downed power lines and snapped or uprooted trees, neighbors stopped to check in on neighbors as everyone worked to clean up. Amanda Francke watched her fiance, Ronald Bartlett, and several helpers shift the remains of a tree from their driveway to a corner of the yard, not far from her new car, which had been badly damaged when a tree fell on it, too. In her hands she turned a piece of plastic over and over -- a remainder of a stool that had been blown off the porch and blasted apart. She didn't know why she was carrying it around, she said.

They, too, had suffered no losses beyond property damage. In the 30 seconds after learning the tornado had touched down nearby, the couple scooped up their pets and crowded into the basement bathroom just before the cyclone hit.

"You could hear the suction and the air being pulled out of the house," she said. It sounded like a rain of gravel. When they looked out at the destruction in their yard and in the road, her first thought was, "Thank you, Jesus, that our lives were spared." Everything else can be cleaned up, replaced, repaired.

"We're doing the best we can," she said, looking out at the work yet to be done.

Up the hill and around a corner, Evalina Finn had a crowd assembled in her yard on the property she shares with several family members. Several neighbors and friends from church had stopped by to help Finn and her family remove a tree from her roof, and to make sure they were all OK. As the afternoon wore on and the sun got hotter, a woman laid out a tall stack of white bread and packages of ham and cheese on some of Finn's garden furniture so that everyone could make sandwiches.

"I have had so much company," said Finn, smiling. Even as more guests assembled in the yard, drivers who knew her slowed on the road to check in, sometimes with humor that was brusque but well-received.

"Who put that tree on your house?" one called out, sending her a familiar grin.

"Wasn't me!" she called back.

When the trees are removed, Finn will have an insurance company appraise the damage and work on repairs.

"It won't be normal," she said; after a brush with a tornado like that, how could it be? But it could be good again.

And in the meantime, there was white bread and lunch meat on her garden table.

"I think I'm gonna make me a sandwich," Finn said, and rejoined her supporters.

Contact Brittani Howell at 812-331-4243, [email protected] or follow @HT_InSchool on Twitter.

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