Picking Up the Pieces

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April 29, 2009

Waynesburg family rebuilding after tornado

By HEATHER PYLES, CJ Staff Writer The Commonwealth Journal Wed Apr 29, 2009, 11:08 PM EDT

Joe McAninch admits to being a little jumpy these days.

And the Waynesburg resident has reason to be. Nearly three weeks ago, on April 10, Joe, his stepdaughter, her boyfriend and Joe’s stepson huddled inside the small bathroom in the trailer the family occupied while a twister — and possibly more — raged over them.

“We started hearing like a freight train ... and that was when it started taking place,” Joe said last Friday, April 24.

The twister — part of the same system that tore a path through Eubank, destroying barns and outbuildings and flipping a trailer in the process — traveled over the steep hillside behind the home and ripped the roof clean off the residence.

All while the four huddled in the only room they could think would keep them safe from the storm’s siege.

But that wouldn’t be the end. Joe said the four were greeted by a sudden silence after the roof was taken, which exposed the residence and its occupants to torrential rain. That silence quickly gave way to the all encompassing roar of another twister.

“I thought it (the tornado) had doubled back on us,” Joe said.

That was when the family couldn’t help but think this time around wouldn’t end so well.

“I said ‘It’s our time’ and we laid back down,” Joe said about those few terrifying minutes.

But the second time the storm came down on the home ended as soon as it had started.

“It just got real quiet,” Joe said.

The four emerged from their makeshift shelter from the storm to see that the twisters had traveled across a field directly in front of the home and damaged other buildings. Splintered trees were everywhere, and an unoccupied trailer beside their home had also been destroyed.

Joe and his family didn’t know it, but the storm had also left a trail of destruction all the way from Eubank as the twisters jumped unpredictably from location to location.

“It was up and down all the way from Eubank, I think,” said Stan Vickers, the pastor at the Family Worship Center, where Joe and his family attend church services.

But Joe and his family were alive, and their home, while lacking a roof, was mostly untouched.

“You can look through and still see things on the shelf,” Stan said.

And had Joe’s girlfriend, Geneva Marlin, been home at the time of the storm and not at work, a fifth person would have been witness to — and possibly injured by — the powerful storm.

Others had also avoided the worst. A family was slated to move into the destroyed unoccupied trailer in the near future before the storm hit.

Not only that, but Joe’s family’s dogs and chickens had survived the ordeal. One dog, a terrier mix, had even been in a closet in the home with her newborn pups when the tornados hit. They survived the severe weather as well.

But the fact still stood that the home was uninhabitable.

That was when Joe’s fellow church-goers at the Family Worship Center, located just over the Pulaski County line in Lincoln County, decided to lend a hand. The very next day church members were at the home to put a temporary tarp up to serve as a roof.

And then the repairs began.

Last Friday, the skeleton of the new roof stood out sharply against the piles of twisted tin, splintered trees and debris from other buildings. It would only be one or two more days before the family would have a new roof on their home.

For more, read Thursday's Commonwealth Journal.

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