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Storm Victims Start Cleanup Effort

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By RICHARD FAUSSET and JENNY JARVIE, Los Angeles Times

Published: February 8, 2008

HUNTERSVILLE, Tenn. - They knew they couldn't set this little country community right in a day - the storms had been too brutal for that. But at least, they figured, they could clean it up.

All along the two-lane road through town, men in hunting jackets moved around quickly in heavy machinery, plowing and piling debris. Farmers in ball caps amputated horizontal cedars, poplars and pines with buzzing chain saws. Church women in fresh makeup and work gloves tidied the yards in front of roofless homes.

"I want to help if I can help," said Betty Swims, 65, as she gathered fallen branches from the home of a local farmer. "It's a great thing to do, I think. Every hand makes a difference."

The scene played out in communities across the South on Thursday as residents and volunteers turned from locating the living and the dead to cleaning up and moving on.

Fifty-nine people were killed and more than 300 injured, some in critical condition.

On Thursday morning, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen boarded military helicopters to fly over a patchwork of neatly tended farm fields, small woods and savage destruction.

There Were More Than 60 Storms

Trees meant to buffer fields from the wind lay like broken twigs along the road. Whole forests were flattened as if felled by a giant weed-whacker.

The National Weather Service, which had teams conducting aerial scans to track the storms' path and intensity, estimated that as many as 63 tornadoes - some with winds as high as 160 mph - touched down across Tennessee, Arkansas and Alabama.

"It was truly a miracle that there were not lives lost," Bredesen said after flying over Union University, a small college in Jackson, Tenn., that sustained major damage but no casualties.

Tornadoes eviscerated dorm rooms there, ripping the siding off buildings and leaving muddy pink insulation flapping in the wind.

"We can replace these buildings," Chertoff told a crowd that included exhausted students clutching cans of Red Bull energy drink. "We cannot replace lost lives."

Talk of miracles fanned through the northern Tennessee town of Castalian Springs, where an 11-month-old baby was found early Wednesday morning lying face down in a muddy pasture, 150 yards from where his home once stood.

In neighboring Macon County, where 14 people died, rescue teams continued to search for trapped residents. On Wednesday night, searchers picking through the debris of a collapsed house rescued a family from their basement.

"It will take years to clean everything up," said Shelvy Linville, mayor of Macon County, who lost one of his best friends, Jimmy Shaw. "We got so much rubble, could be we could find more bodies."

Recovery Well Under Way

In most of the region, recovery was in full swing. From Arkansas to Alabama, contractors loaded shredded trees onto flatbed trucks, utility workers restrung wires onto telephone poles and residents picked through the rubble of their homes, hoping to retrieve mementos.

In Huntersville, an unincorporated Tennessee community about eight miles from Jackson, many homes were beyond repair. A few were little more than splintered wood and broken junk that the winds had fanned across green expanses of wheat fields.

Along state Highway 70, dozens of helpers tended to the property where three generations of the Verell family have grown corn and other crops on 2,500 acres. A 20-foot-high pile of debris had been set on fire behind their two ruined houses.

Michele Verell, 48, was on the second floor of a house with sloping floors and strange angles, cleaning out what was salvageable. Church friends had come, bringing food, comfort and assurances that they would build back bigger and better.

"This is their lives - they've got to come back," said Cathy Powell, 46, wife of the preacher at North Jackson Church of Christ. "This is where their farms are."

Verell's husband, Allen, built the house 24 years ago; they raised their three children here. Its sturdy basement probably saved them Tuesday night. But at 2 p.m. Wednesday, an insurance adjuster said it would have to be torn down. Since then, Verell said, she had been numbing herself with work.

"I haven't tried to think about it," she said. "You can't think about it. You just do. It probably won't sink in until they bulldoze it."

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