Picking up the pieces

Cristina's mother, Clara McCrary,  carefully took the cards out of their damp envelopes and put them in a plastic bin.

"There's not much left to save," said her husband, Freddy McCrary, as Clara put the lid on the bin.

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Stan White looked at an overturned sports utility vehicle, a large red X slashed through the white paint. He closed his eyes.

“That's Chelsea’s car,” he whispered.

White’s first cousin, Chris Black, and his daughter, Chelsea, were among the victims of the monster tornado that hit Ringgold. Their bodies  had been located, but  Black’s wife, Pamela, son, Cody, and baby daughter nicknamed “BB” had not.

"[They] could be anywhere,” White said, his eyes heavy.

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The Rev. Ronnie Cline of the Church of the Covenant sat under a tent in the parking lot that fronts the stone foundation where his little 106-year-old church used to stand. He and other church members had tables piled with food, water and supplies to give to those in the community and those who came Friday to help clean up.

Cline said his little congregation of 80 or so in Bartow County plans to worship in the parking lot Sunday morning at 11 a.m., the normal time for Sunday service.

Asked if here was going to take up an offering, Cline laughed and said:  "Yep. I may pass the plate twice this Sunday."

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The Peavy family of Spalding County was recovering Friday after a tornado ripped apart their home. Joe Peavy, whose sleeping daughter was whipped from her bedroom, said the family members were healing after they suffered bruises and cuts from the flying debris. The daughter, Kylie, 13, was helping clean up the property, collecting what was salvageable from the storm.

The family is staying at the home of another family member, and the insurance company has already helped them obtain a rental car. “Everybody is healing nicely,” Peavy said. “We’re just looking to get our house rebuilt and move on.”

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Joe Isham was asleep in his trailer in the Ponderosa Mobile Home park in the Sunny Side community when the twister hit. When he was jolted awake,  "the trailer was floating in the air," he recalled Friday. "I felt the floor tilting one way, then the other. I yelled ‘Lord, help us,' and the trailer slammed back to the ground."

The underside of his single-wide was pushed up into the rest of the trailer, but Isham survived.

So, too did a man, a woman and 1-year-old baby whose nearby trailer was pancaked by the force of the winds.

"You look around at all the devastation, and it's amazing that most people walked out with only scratches and bruises," Isham said Friday.

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"I got here around 3 on Thursday morning and saw that one out in the middle of 19/41," Sunny Side RV general manager George Smith said, pointing at a balled-up hunk of white metal pushed alongside the road that once was a pull-behind camper.

Sunny Side RV had been in business on Georgia Highway 19/41 for eight months. Friday, fifteen trailers, campers and RVs averaging $155,000, as well as a yacht were strewn about the lot. Every one had been tumbled about, torn through or flattened.

"I don't have any inventory," owner Jason Miller lamented.

But the business was surviving, taking on two RV repair jobs on Friday.

"We're going to try to stay open," Smith said.

And recovery? "Hopefully, the finance company will work with us a little while," Miller said. "And FEMA and GEMA will help."

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Geologist Terry Davis lives on a ridge near downtown Knoxville, Tenn. After the storms passed, he found a document in his driveway. It was a mammogram from a clinic about 110 miles away, Chattanooga Imaging.

“I should let this lady know that personal information ... is scattered from there to Knoxville — and maybe further? — but I doubt they have phone, email or even power now,” Davis said.

**********

A tree as large as a building leans against Sharkethia Porter’s back porch railing. If it splits completely and breaks the rail, the tree will come through the back bedroom of her home in Alton, Tenn., she said.

“The insurance adjusters say they’re coming. The city says they’re coming. The Electric Power Board says they’re coming. Everybody says they’re coming. They just don’t know when they’re going to get here,” Porter said. “The good thing is we have no place else to go, so we’ll be here, too.”

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It was only a couple of months ago when Dunlap, Tenn., Mayor Dwain Land received a Facebook post asking what happened to the town siren that alerted people when something bad was going to happen.

Land said he went to the fire department to investigate whether the siren still worked and discovered bird nests in it. After cleaning out the nests, the siren still worked.

On Wednesday, the siren rang out throughout the day, warning people of the waves of storms about to hit town.

Staff Writers Marcus K. Garner, Craig Schneider, Christopher Quinn and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

By Staff Writer Joy Lukachick

By Staff Writer Joy Lukachick

By Staff Writer Joy Lukachick

— By Staff Writer Andy Johns

— By Staff Writer Andy Johns

ALTON PARK

ROCK SPRING, Ga.

Sequatchie County, 1 dead

RINGGOLD, Ga.

Stan White looked at an overturned sports utility vehicle, a large red X slashed through the white paint. He closed his eyes.

White, a long-time resident on Cherokee Valley Road, pointed to the paint and whispered “that’s Chelsea’s car.”

Just an hour before on Thursday, the bodies of White’s first cousin, Chris Black, and his daughter, Chelsea, were found near their house.

But Black’s wife, Pamela, son, Cody, and baby daughter nicknamed “BB” couldn’t be located.

“[They] could be anywhere,” White said, his eyes heavy.

The devastation on Cherokee Valley Road stretches for several miles. Authorities said it took the brunt of the tornadoes that ripped through Catoosa County.

The storms leveled dozens of houses and killed at least eight in the neighborhood, authorities said. Neighbors said at least 15 people were still missing Thursday, but authorities couldn’t confirm reports of missing people.

From a first glance when turning off U.S. Highway 41, the road appears untouched from any destruction. But about a mile down, the trees start to look mangled. Come around a bend and the devastation explodes.

Trees along the hills sprout like spikes, blades of wood shorn by a cosmic lawnmower. Foundations of houses lay barren. Sofa cushions, house insulation and shoes lay scattered along ditches and in ponds.

On Thursday, dogs sniffed through the rubble, trying to locate the missing — dead or alive.

By Staff Writer Joy Lukachick

RINGGOLD

Connie Gilreath feels more fortunate than many of her neighbors.

“I look at it this way: I get to build a new house,” she said.

Her home on Cherokee Valley Road has caved in. When the tornadoes hit, Gilreath grabbed her teenage son and ran to the basement. Once the storms passed, they were able to climb out of the wreckage — exiting from where the garage once sat — to check on family members nearby.

The land where Gilreath’s house once sat has been in her family’s name for more than 150 years. Her mother lives across the street, a cousin is on the hill and another cousin about a block away.

Gilreath’s mother, Lilian Bryson, sat in a green lawn chair in front of her house across the street. Bryson’s husband, who died about 30 years ago, built the house behind her in 1949. A tree has fallen on top of the dark-green home, crushing much of the roof.

“All of it’s gone now,” she said, wiping her eyes.

Family members and friends stop at Bryson’s house and run to hug the fragile-looking woman.

“I’m doing OK,” she told them.

By Staff Writer Joy Lukachick

RINGGOLD

Aipan Gajjar was watching the news from the third story of his father’s hotel, the Baymont Inn & Suites right off Interstate 75, when the wind began to roar outside.

Going to the window, Gajjar saw a funnel cloud swirling directly at him. Grabbing his aunt, Pushpa Champaneria, he dove into the bathroom next to the window and crouched inside with three other family members.

They huddled in the bathroom as the side of the room and the entire roof were wrenched off the building.

“We just started praying,” said Champaneria.

On Thursday morning, drywall, food and clothes are flung on the floor of the wrecked room. The kitchenette’s countertop is still intact and two tortillas still sit neatly in the toaster oven from the family’s interrupted meal the night before.

Gajjar’s father, Ravi, stands at what’s left of the hotel’s front entrance, saying nothing. Every window of the entrance is shattered. Most of the building’s backside is torn off and furniture sits in the obliterated rooms.

Ravi and his family came back to salvage any belongings left inside.

But they can’t.

“Everything’s gone,” he said, tears welling up.

By Staff Writer Joy Lukachick

ROSSVILLE, Ga.

With all of the lights out in Rossville, state Rep. Martin Scott, R-Rossville, drove to the Fort Oglethorpe Walmart, expecting to find empty shelves where the candles had been. He found that the store has a steady supply, though, and bought $100 worth. Then he drove around Rossville, handing them out to people without power.

“You just try to find people that need help and help them,” Scott said.

— By Staff Writer Andy Johns

RINGGOLD, Ga.

Most of those injured in Ringgold are people who happened to stop at the Interstate 75 exit to grab a bite to eat, stay the night or ride out storms.

On Thursday morning, cars are scattered around the area, suggesting that drivers abandoned them in a hurry. One minivan sits a gas pump near the interchange, the station collapsed around it.

A sack full of Krystals rests in the passenger seat of a badly beaten Jeep Cherokee that is tossed like — well, a bag of Krystals — onto a sidewalk.

Many of the former fast-food restaurants, gas stations and hotels are unrecognizable and county officials must identify the splintered heaps to the media.

During the tornado, four people were trapped in a bathroom at the BP station in Ringgold as the building tore to pieces around them, according to Catoosa County Sheriff Phil Summers.

— By Staff Writer Andy Johns

Weather vignettes from Times Free Press

Wednesday’s storms blew away lives and houses — and some personal records.

Geologist Terry Davis lives on a ridge near downtown Knoxville. He trudged outside his home Thursday morning and found a document in his driveway. It was a mammogram from a clinic about 110 miles away, Chattanooga Imaging.

“I should let this lady know that personal information ... is scattered from there to Knoxville — and maybe further? — but I doubt they have phone, email or even power now,” Davis emailed.

Hixson homeowner Clay Bolling, 77, had a similar find. As he sorted through insulation, roofing and other debris, Bolling spotted a bank deposit slip from Huntsville, Ala., and a black cowboy hat.

The deposit had a person’s name on it.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said.

— By staff writer Chris Carroll

ALTON PARK

A tree as large as a building lay against Sharkethia Porter’s back porch railing. If it splits completely and breaks the rail, the tree will come through the back bedroom of her Dorris Street home, she said.

“The insurance adjusters say they’re coming. The city says they’re coming. The Electric Power Board says they’re coming. Everybody says they’re coming. They just don’t know when they’re going to get here,” Porter said. “The good thing is we have no place else to go, so we’ll be here, too.”

The tree is one of three that fell toward Porter’s three-bedroom home during Wednesday’s storms. A tree near the front of her house fell on her car.

“All of this came unglued around 9 a.m.,” she said. “By 10:30, it was a wrap.”

— By staff writer Yolanda Putman

ROCK SPRING, Ga.

Albert Hutcherson, his wife and sister-in-law had the television on, keeping track of Wednesday night’s storms, when reality sank in.

“I told them, ‘Well, we’re in for some bad trouble,’” Hutcherson recalled Thursday.

They soon took cover in a bathroom in the center of their Cooper Road house.

“And we heard the wind begin to blow. And we heard glass breaking and the lights went out. And it was all over,” he said. “Not more than 20 seconds.”

When the coast was clear, Hutcherson walked out his back door and saw a tree on his deck and considered himself lucky that there was no more damage than that.

But then his sister-in-law walked through the living room.

“She said, ‘No, that ain’t all. You’ve got a tree plum through the house,’” Hutcherson said.

A tree in his backyard, which he estimated to be 100 feet tall, had crash through the house and split it.

Hutcherson’s wife called her son, who lives down the road.

“She was hysterical, panicking,” Chris Wheeler said.

And the daylight revealed why. The aftermath was “devastation — about like a war zone,” he said.

— By Correspondent Timothy Bradfield

Sequatchie County, 1 dead

DUNLAP, Tenn.

It was only a couple of months ago when Mayor Dwain Land received a Facebook post asking what happened to the town siren that alerted people when something bad was going to happen.

Land said he went to the fire department to investigate whether the siren still worked and discovered bird nests in them. After cleaning out the nests, the siren still worked.

On Wednesday, the siren rang out throughout the day, warning people of the waves of storms about to hit town.

Major damage included smashed stop lights at intersections on Highway 127, Rankin Avenue and Main Street. Signs and roofs were blown off, and downed trees and power lines were strewn about.

Dunlap had one fatality. A man drowned trying to cross a flooded creek, Land said.

“It’s just the worst thing I’ve seen in Dunlap in my 51 years,” Land said. “I was just saddened. I was so scared every time we pulled up to a place to see if they needed help that someone was going to be dead or injured really bad. We were fortunate; I can’t imagine some of these other towns.”

— Correspondent Corrina Sisk-Casson