More than three years ago, a devastating and deadly tornado ripped through west Kentucky in the middle of December. Now, in Dawson Springs, the debris has mostly been cleaned up and many of the destroyed and damaged homes have been replaced or repaired, but there’s still a ways to go.
For Dawson Springs Mayor Jenny Sewell, the town’s recovery is a personal matter.
“It's hard to see things that you stood there and worked for all your life just turned to rubbish, but that's exactly what happened,” she said in a recent interview.
Sewell, a native Dawsonian, served as mayor before the disaster and was reelected after Chris Smiley – the mayor at the time of the tornado – decided not to run for another term.
One of the major pieces of the Hopkins County community’s ongoing recovery efforts is the restoration of the Dawson Springs City Park.
Before the disaster, the park in the middle of the small city had a working public pool, tennis courts, basketball courts and baseball and softball fields. Now, its most prominent features are the cinderblock barbeque pits for the community’s annual barbeque that’s run for more than 75 years and a stone memorial dedicated to victims of the tornado.
“We hope in the spring of this year we'll have a total rebuild of our city park,” Sewell said. “We have a lovely city – had, we had, past tense, a lovely city park … and it just took all that out.”
Sewell said the renovated park will be built to current safety standards and codes, not to the standards it was originally constructed under. She said that’s slowed down the process, along with environmental factors.
Sewell hopes that spring will see the city complete repairs to its streets, sidewalks and storm drains that were damaged by the tornado.
The mayor said that Dawson Springs is still receiving help from Kentucky Emergency Management and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She said the swiftness of FEMA aid has left something to be desired, but that she knows they’re just doing their job.
“A lot of people think that FEMA is a quick thing,” Sewell said. “It is not. It is absolutely not, and they have certain, they have specific rules as to how they operate.”
FEMA specialists are aiding the city with its effort to renovate the park, which has benefited from funds provided by both public and private contributors. Sewell said, after the city thought they had completed the write-up, a FEMA specialist told them it needed to be rewritten to meet the organization’s standards.
“The site that we had will have to be redesigned and so much excavation work done and [by the] time you do all of that, it just takes a lot of money to make that happen,” she said. “But in the end, when it's all said and done, we're going to have a beautiful new park, up to codes and up to standards of today.”
The city is preparing to open the bidding period for the project, which will feature the exact same facilities and amenities as it had before the disaster.
Just down the road, the industrial park is also being rebuilt. Before the tornado, the complex housed a few industrial developments as well as a spec building.
The local government is hoping to fuel development at the site, with just one of the industry tenants rebuilding after the disaster. To do so, they’re relying on grant dollars from the Kentucky Product Development Initiative.
“We were fortunate to locate … what is called a KPDI grant, which is a economic development industrial grant that would have to be matched 50-50, and the the county was agreeable to match that $2 million with another $2 million that represented the insurance monies from the spec building that was destroyed in the tornado,” Sewell said.
Rebuilding homes
Housing in Dawson Springs took a major hit during the tornado, with some authorities estimating upwards of 70% of the community’s housing was impacted by the disaster.
One of the apartment complexes for the Dawson Springs Housing Authority, Clarkdale Court, was destroyed along with other multi-family housing units and many single-family homes. In all, Sewell said about 400 families were displaced by the storm.
Some of those families and individuals may wind up living at a new middle-income housing development being constructed on a corner of the industrial park. Sewell said the city is also preparing to bid out that project, which is expected to boast nearly 90 multi-family units with rents based on tenants’ incomes.
“We're thinking that this is going to be a very wonderful thought, as far as how the plan would be to work out, and how it will work out in people's lives,” Sewell said.
While some Dawsonians were able to rebuild their homes through insurance and personal savings, others got help from programs like Habitat for Humanity, Catholic Charities and the Fuller Center for Housing.
Heath Duncan is the director of the Hopkins County Long-Term Recovery Group and the executive director of Habitat for Humanity’s Pennyrile Region chapter. Both organizations have been heavily involved in the area’s recovery process.
Duncan said the LTRG provided case management to connect people with the assistance they needed and make sure benefits didn’t get duplicated.
“The long term recovery group really focused more on volunteer coordination, funding and repair projects, and so the long term recovery group did not do any complete rebuilds. No new construction,” Duncan said. “We did engage with volunteer groups from around the country to do repair projects and to support some of the build partners.”
That included working with build partners like Habitat for Humanity, which Duncan said will have built about 35 houses by the time the group is done with builds for tornado applications.
“Most of what was destroyed was rental property, and even the houses that were destroyed, most of those were landlord owned rental properties,” Duncan said. “When we were acquiring property, it was mostly from landlords that weren't going to rebuild, and so we either took the lot as a donation, or we bought the lot and then built a house.”
According to Sewell, in the three years since the disaster, the Dawson Springs community has rebuilt more than 100 homes in the part of town devastated by the tornado.
