LAKEVIEW, Ohio — Residents in a part of the central U.S. hit by deadly tornadoes spent Saturday cleaning up, assessing damage and helping neighbors. But it will be a long recovery from the storms that tore through parts of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Arkansas.
Thursday night’s storms claimed three lives in the Indian Lake area of Ohio’s Logan County, one of the hardest-hit regions, and injured about 40 people and damaged dozens of homes in an Indiana community. Tornadoes were also reported in Illinois and Missouri.
Samantha Snipes, 33, said when she first heard the tornado warning, she called her father, who lives seven minutes away, and told him to take cover. He said he tried to do that by crawling into the closet of her parents’ home and then the phone went dead, she told The Associated Press.
She and her husband tried to drive along the main road to get to him, but they couldn’t. They were able to come the back way after the tornado passed.
“It looked like something out of a movie, like ‘Twister,’” she said. “My father’s garage was razed to the ground. The back of his house is gone. As if everything is gone.”
They climbed over everything and shouted for him. When they found him, he was not injured and told them to stop crying, she said.
Her father, Joe Baker, had always told his children to hide in the closet if a tornado ever came.
“We grew up here. Like this is our childhood home,” said Snipes, who spent Saturday throwing out things and sorting through what could be saved. “And you see it on the news. But you never imagine it will happen to you.”
Steve Wills, a pastor who owns a vacation home down the road on Orchard Island, said Saturday he was bringing a family crew to finish the cleanup and patch a hole in the roof.
“We are saddened for the families who have lost people. There have been three deaths in our community. You know, that breaks our hearts,” Wills said. ‘But it could have been so much more, so much more. Yes, so I still have confidence.”
The community has been very supportive, Snipes said. The school inspector dropped off food, clothing and diapers on Friday, she said. On the night of the tornado, the neighbors on her father’s street went from house to house to turn off the gas.
“Everyone on this road is safe. You know neighbors helping neighbors, that’s what it’s been,” Snipes said.