Screams under the rubble

(Mayfield, Ky.) He works the day at the chicken slaughterhouse. She works evenings at the candle factory.

Friday after the job, like every evening, Tim McCampbell went to pick up his 3-year-old daughter. It was about a storm, maybe a tornado, but here, tornado alerts, it’s okay and it starts again just as quickly.

The little one was in bed when the siren sounded.

“I looked out the window, we saw flashes in the sky… And the noise! Like a giant fan in your ear… ”

He understood it was for real this time.

He lay on top of his child waiting for it to pass, that’s all he thought of doing. Thirty seconds later, there was no more sound, no more light. The house had held up.

The phone rang. It was his girlfriend at the factory.

” Come get me ! We’re stuck! ”

It was under the debris of the Mayfield Consumer Products factory, just down the street, where you can see the huge pile, and where you are still looking four days later …

The neighbor was outside, on her property, looking around, like everyone else. She came to keep the child.

He ran like crazy at the factory.

We couldn’t see anything, there was no electricity (there still isn’t any) or any light. Help was starting to arrive.

“I heard people screaming ‘Help! Help !” And I could see phone lights through the piles of debris. Pieces of wood, metal, of all sizes, machinery, all piled up absurdly. After three calls, his girlfriend’s phone stopped working.

He removed as much material as he could, without really seeing what he was doing. Two cousins, neighbors at the end of the street, came out. They were at least two meters under the rubble.

Four hours later, he learned that she had been rescued.

“Her mother works with her, and when they took shelter, she took her under her to protect her, you know, she’s her daughter… She also took her best friend. But he died right next to her, they couldn’t do anything… A 21 year old guy. They don’t know what happened, it was so dark and people were screaming… ”

The man telling me all this is called Tim McCampbell. He had just left the house, with clothes, the little one’s gifts, a TV …

“It was the manager who opened the door for me, because the key remained in my girlfriend’s car, and her car disappeared in the parking lot of the factory …”

What is scandalous at the moment is that, according to several testimonies, the bosses ignored the first alert and did not evacuate the factory. At least eight people died there. On the second alert, everyone took shelter in the factory. The roof has been raised. The walls have collapsed. And it all fell on the workers.

“They told him to keep working despite the first alert,” McCampbell says.

They live in a social housing neighborhood that Americans know as “section 8,” which is federally funded, income-weighted social housing.

“There isn’t a lot of money here, so jobs at $ 13, $ 14 an hour, you don’t want to lose that …”

She got away with broken pelvis and ribs as well as burns from the chemicals that spilled out. No more post-traumatic shock.

In the streets of this small town in rural southwest Kentucky, the cleanup has already begun. The trees have been removed from the roads. Telephone and electricity poles are packed. Everywhere, workers are picking up debris, tamping down objects, while others are repairing roofs.

Everywhere, teams are busy arriving from all over the country. Volunteers provide sandwiches and water to the workers. The people of the spared districts begin to take the measure of the damage, by walking, bewildered, in the middle of the ruins which seem to follow a precise drawing.

After the shock and panic, a kind of calm and concentration set in. There is so much to do…

“Luckily I was in jail, it saved me, because I might be dead,” Andre Brown told me.

“I work at the candle factory in the evening shift, except I have to go to jail for six weekends… Impaired, yeah, it’s not my first arrest…”

So he was sleeping in the prison when the tornado hit. He could also have gone there, since the prison is in the courthouse, and its central part has collapsed. As a result, around 60 inmates had to be handcuffed and sent to the nearby county jail. “I have four weekends left to serve …”

Robert Miller also served time, and that’s why he left Cincinnati for this quiet little town. He has found God and takes care of the halfway house run by his church.

“I was on the gallery watching the storm. “

“I remembered what my mother told me: go to a closet and protect yourself with mattresses. I made it like an igloo, and dragged the guys with me. The fifth just had time to hide in the toilet. I heard the window shatter. And 30 seconds later, nothing … ”

He shows me around the house, the upper floor of which is completely razed.

“I went to see the firefighters, they gave me a lamp to go see the neighbors. In a house, an old lady was dead… I took her out. In another house, I saw a mother with a small child, 4 or 5 years old… he was dead. ”

The trail of this tornado is incredibly long. It damaged 300 km, from Arkansas to Ohio.

But at the same time, the damage is in a narrow corridor, and on either side everything has remained pretty much intact.

Keith Perkins, a carpenter, heard the tornado strike two blocks from his home.

“I surrendered to God. I put on my motorcycle helmet and sat in the living room waiting for it to pass.

– Why the helmet?

– We must trust God, but we must not provoke him. ”

Rick Folley was told to go spend the night in a shelter. Three-quarters of his house had vanished as he clung to a pipe in the toilet.

But he returned.

” I have two cats… ”

It was black. He stepped on an object. He leaned forward.

“It was the portrait of my wife, she died at 22 giving birth to my son, 38 years ago… I said to myself: at least I haven’t lost that. ”

A cat has returned. The other ? “I know where he is, but he’s scared, he’s still waiting…”

At the end of the day, he is sitting in front of this ruin which was his home. He contemplates the devastated neighborhood.

“But I’m alive. ”

It is hardly believable, the quantity of churches that one meets in this city of barely 10,000 inhabitants. We are in the Bible Belt. Each plays a community role, serves meals, offers refuge, organizes work, etc.

Pastor Gregg Hussey is awaiting delivery of $ 75,000 in food and essentials from a donor in Louisville when I meet him.

He had bought the oldest church in town and turned it into a temple of diversity, all races united, the New Visions Church. He shows me the cornerstone: 1890. It’s just a heap of bricks.

“I don’t know what God meant to tell me… Maybe he had more ambitious plans for me? But it will be OK. It will take as long as it takes, but a meaning will emerge. ”