A Tornado Story

One family’s saga in the hours, days, weeks and months after Newnan’s EF-4

Written by MELISSA DICKSON JACKSON

Author’s note: I suspect many of the families who endured the night of March 26, 2021, will recognize their own story in this account of the immediate aftermath of the tornado. 

By 1 a.m., I knew two things: 

1. No one was coming to save us. There was no cavalry. My father wasn’t going to burst through the door with a helicopter waiting in the near distance. We were on our own. If the house fell in, if the gas line I could smell leaking burst into flames, if one of the children were injured – we were on our own and trapped until dawn.

2. Our lives were going to change in ways we had never imagined. There was a massive oak tree that fell through the roof. It had crushed the kitchen, office and living room. It had collapsed with such force that it punctured through the floor and into the basement where we took shelter. The windows and the storm door had been shattered or blown out into the back yard. Ceiling rafters lay across my daughter’s bed where she slept only an hour before. Shards of glass, roofing insulation and asbestos-laden transite shingles littered my bed. One shard of glass the size of a driver’s license had hurtled through our bathroom with such force that it wedged nearly half an inch into the hard wood of a 70-year-old medicine cabinet.

Between 1 and 2 a.m., I traveled the 40 feet between our basement and the trapped van 10 times carting kittens and commanding children. Which was safer? The basement where I could smell gas and hear the rain falling all around us, or the van, sealed but out in the open where one of the few remaining trees could fall if – God forbid – another tornado emerged? It could happen, I thought.

The stillness in the air was forbidding, unforgiving, ominous. I filled the van with beloved artwork and treasured musical instruments and herded the children and pets back into the basement.

By 3 a.m., I lay on my grandparents’ 40-year-old, hand-me-down Serta sleeper, hovering along the hard metal frame at the edge. My daughters, 9 and 14, slept nestled against me. Their gentle deep breathing seemed oddly normal in our battered home. Even though the metal frame pressed uncomfortably into my ribs, I dared not move my girls back into the open expanse on the other side of the bare mattress. Their sleep was a miracle.

In a tall laundry basket, our new kittens mewed and complained at the imprisonment, while our aging ginger cat wandered about in the debris upstairs refusing to concede to the destruction.

My 16-year-old son found a sleeping bag and unfurled it in a narrow walkway against the dryer only to discover that the dog had urinated nearby. After some clean up, he settled down again to a fitful rest. My older son was able to sleep on his own bed in a corner room of the basement.

My husband sat restless and alert in a tattered French club chair relegated to the basement. In his lap, he held a pistol usually locked away in a gun safe. “In case of looters,” he said. “Looters,” I wondered. “How would they get to us? How would they get away? What would they take?”

The computer lay crushed under the tree. The TV was 10 years old and weighed 70 pounds. Outside, felled trees trapped the entire neighborhood. One of our cars lay under a cypress, while three other cypress trees striped the driveway like giant fallen sentinels. I lay there imagining the improbable looters crawling through the dark branches, tripping over the debris and glass shards.

By 4:30 a.m., it was as dark as it had ever been in my home, except for the occasional dim light from my husband’s phone. He scrolled for news of our friends and neighbors, for some small bit of normalcy. He rationed the minutes as his battery declined in this power outage we suspected would never end at this iteration of 23 Fifth Street.

At 5 a.m., rain. The drip, drip, drip of water was all around us. I could hear it coming for us from my son’s punctured room, sliding across the floor like a cancer we couldn’t stem. I slept and dreamed of wind, water, black forms shifting in the darkness, green lightning on the horizon. I wanted to rise up like a wide-winged angel repelling the rain and wind that lurched in my dreams.

I woke abruptly at 6:30 a.m. Voices! Yelling! The thundering of boots barreled down the steep basement steps. Silhouettes of bodies hurled down. The looters? My husband bolted up, pistol in hand.

“Anybody here?” they called.

We were too stunned to answer, too unsure.

“Anybody here,” they called again.

“We are here,” I think. “We are here,” my husband yelled.

It was my father-in-law and our friends Carl Marino and Dwayne Luttrell who recently renovated the girls’ bathroom. They parked blocks away and climbed over and under fallen trees to reach us.

The girls turned in their strange sleep. Then we all rose in the still, lilac dawn to a strange and unfamiliar landscape. The oak tree under which I stood, age eight, at my first encounter with the people who would become my mother and father-in-law nearly forty years later, lay across our home, splitting it in half. The rootball, cantilevered up, stood taller than the former roofline of our home.

Our patio furniture lay scattered and twisted, the ceramic fountain under our living room window, shattered and shapeless. Christmas photos of the children had been propelled into the neighbor’s yard with splintered frames.

Later that morning, neighbors and friends began to arrive. Larisa Scott came with bins and had the foresight to send her husband Michael to rent a storage unit.

In the days that followed, Larisa also found a rental home off Fourth Street that was available at a daily AirBNB rate. It was exorbitant and absurd under any other circumstances, nearly $6,000 a month, but we signed a six-month lease and were glad to have done so when we began to hear of friends and neighbors in extended-stay hotel rooms. It meant we would have to expedite our rebuild in order to stay within our alternative living expenses budget. This wasn’t a long-term solution.

As we anticipated, our adjuster declared the house a total loss. We hired a draftsman, David Van Drew, and found a contractor, Carey Jackson (a cousin), willing to take on the new build. In a few months, we had a house plan that delighted us. We hired asbestos abatement experts to remove the transite asbestos shingles and demolish the upper floor of the house. Carey struggled to uproot the concrete portions of the house which sat like ancient monoliths on the lot for months. 

By mid-summer, we could see that things weren’t going according to schedule. We had to be out of the AirBNB rental by the end of September, and there was nothing available besides a kind offer from a friend who was willing to rent us her home and stay at a vacation home in Florida while we rebuilt. The offer was wonderful but imperfect. With three teenagers, two of whom are graduating this year, and one grade school student, we needed room for everyone to go to their corners. One of our children was threatening to move out and another to enlist in the Army as soon as he could. 

My phone calls to Carey were getting more panicked when one day he replied by text that he had COVID. I knew then that the vision we had of rebuilding our home on 5th Street was slipping away. Supply and lumber costs were outrageous; vendors hesitated to even give estimates. We needed a contract to get the construction loan, but Carey couldn’t get commitments from any of his suppliers. We were stalled at the first step.

I woke up one morning in late July weeping. We had weeks to solve massive problems and few prospects. On the third day of a deep desolation – really the first I’d experienced since the tornado – I opened my email to find a listing for a 1963 brick colonial ranch with a full finished basement.

We weren’t looking for another house to buy. My husband’s family had purchased our home in 1970, and he had purchased it from them just before our wedding. My husband’s grandfather had been part of the construction crew for the original family that built the home. I was forbidden from altering our bedroom closet lest I disturb Grandfather’s handiwork.

As children, Dean and I had played in the yard. As teenagers, we’d sat on the rusting swing set and talked about Henry Miller and Anais Nin. As adults, we’d raised a family and renovated the kitchen and one bathroom; we’d removed wallpaper and painted; planned and schemed for future renovations; imagined ourselves into a future with grandchildren. We agreed absolutely that the only option was to build a new home on the same site.

Nonetheless, I called a friend, Jessica Mottola, and asked her to get me in to see the house in the listing. It was exactly the same size as the house we intended to build, but it had the character and vintage appeal of the house we lost. It had a basement with a bathroom and laundry and room for the boys, like the house we’d lost and the one we planned to build. It had a side patio and back patio like what we’d had and was within walking distance of downtown and near my job at West Georgia and Dean’s office at the Board of Education. As luck would have it, it was around the corner from Jessica’s house. I was inside it within an hour, and I knew immediately that we could make it our home. I felt my grandmother in the living room ushering me through and whispering her approval.

I convinced Dean to see it the next day on the pretense that it was the same size as the one we planned to build. He agreed but asserted that “we aren’t buying another house.” After a visit with Jo and Mitt Farmer (Mitt’s grandfather had built the house in question for his daughter Elizabeth), we made an offer that night. 

We are lucky to have found the perfect home for our family when we weren’t looking for it. I don’t say this lightly, but the timing and the ideal nature of the house make it feel like the answer to a prayer we were too afraid to ask. We’ve been in our new home since September. The light fixtures I bought for the rebuild fit perfectly. The furniture we collected at estate sales and consignment stores works beautifully in the new space. 

We still have the lot on Fifth Street. After we finish removing the remaining shards of concrete, we hope to transform it into a meditation garden for our friends and neighbors there. We know we are lucky that this solution came into our lives when it did. So many of our friends and neighbors continue to battle renovation and insurance issues. Maybe a space to take solace and sit quietly will do us all good.

And one day, maybe, one of our children can build the house we dreamed of, and their children can play where Dean and I played. NCM

Hope is on the Way

Written by NANCY LANGER

As emergency disaster services specialist for The Salvation Army in Newnan, Nancy Langer was among the first on the scene after the March 26 tornado in 2021. Here, she recalls the day.

Being the disaster relief worker in your own town during a disaster is surreal. It is near impossible to describe how it feels. I was at Ground Zero a few hours after the storm and didn’t recognize the neighborhoods around me. All the landmarks so familiar to me were gone. Navigating the roads was near impossible because of downed trees, wires and debris.

What should have been a 20-minute ride literally took hours. Finally, we arrived with The Salvation Army truck to a tiny section of town where the most vulnerable in Newnan live. I saw the same terror on the faces of these residents as those I served in Haiti right after a large earthquake. I’m not sure if I was happier to see them or they were happier to see me. One thing for sure, we were all equally grateful to be alive.

Living on a fixed income with no insurance, they could not afford to replenish the groceries and possessions they lost from the storm damage. While the hot meals were greatly appreciated, it was seeing someone from outside their catastrophe that meant the most to my fragile neighbors.

We were the first team to arrive that delivered food, water and batteries. The storm victims tearfully recounted the terrifying events that transpired just hours before. What struck me most profoundly was the sincere, repeated gratefulness they voiced because someone had finally come: “You didn’t forget us. You really came!”

As we were giving away all our cleaning supplies, meals and hugs, I witnessed people who most needed help encourage and support each other. They walked meals to neighbors too fragile to come out and get meals for themselves. They prayed with us – for us and each other. Seeing the strength of this neighborhood helping each other transformed my own exhaustion into absolute resolve.

This is what sustains us during the long hours of physically and emotionally exhausting service. It is always the gratefulness and resilience of those who survive life-changing catastrophes that encourages me more than my own service to survivors.

While driving through the devastation each day is still difficult, remembering how the most vulnerable came together that day still inspires me. The sign on the back of The Salvation Army truck reads: “Hope is on the way.”

Hope comes after a disaster not just to the survivors – but also for the rescuers. NCM