Kentucky Farmers and Ag Industry Still Cleaning Up a Year After December 10 Tornado

Sun, 11 Dec 2022 21:03:33 GMT

As the sun rose on December 11th, following a massive EF4 tornado, it revealed the extent of the destruction left behind in and around Mayfield, Kentucky.

Debris is still scattered in the fence rows. Pieces of metal remain jammed into trees. The damage is carved into the countryside along the tornado’s 220-mile path.

“Just seeing who was hurt and what had to happen immediately,” remembers Davie Stephens a farmer in western Kentucky.

The night of the storm, he pulled his neighbors, who are also his landlords, from their house and took them to the hospital for help. The days following the tornado were surreal.

“By the time we got our head wrapped around it, it was a week later,” says Stephens. “So at that point, we started having to pick up in the fields.”

He says a quarter of his farmland was covered in debris. It took until April to clean it up.

“Thank goodness there were some farms we could put off and allow planting schedules to go around,” says Stephens. “We just had to say we’re not done with it because there’s too much debris.”

Pieces of poultry houses were scattered across fields. Crews were forced to go from one end to the other, picking and cleaning so planting could resume. The local USDA office says the price tag for farmland cleanup topped $2 million.

“There were so many days we took two dozers and a backhoe to work on farms,” says Stephens. “My mother-in-law’s farm took nine or 10 days to clean up. We saw everything from debris, to brush and even tree lines were destroyed.”

While Stephens was able to plant, he had to travel miles to find an available elevator come harvest. Mayfield Grain is still damaged and in disrepair.

“Losing Mayfield grain was devastating to the local farm economy,” says Penny Wade Smith, an accountant for farmers in western Kentucky.

To date, the elevator remains closed.

“I talked to a client this week who told me that it was costing him about 50 cents a bushel to haul his product into Tennessee,” says Wade Smith.

“Most of our farmers didn’t have on-farm storage,” says Kyle Yancey, President of River Valley Ag Credit. “The Kentucky Department of Agriculture has put some grant funding up for that purpose but, right now, the biggest impact we have is that farmers have nowhere to take their grain.”

Fencing was also a major loss for many producers. While some ag businesses struggle to rebuild, others have been more fortunate.

“There are millions of dollars worth of poultry barns in West Kentucky and for the most part, they made it through the tornado pretty well,” says Yancey. “There were a few of them with significant damage but outside of the hatchery, the industry survived very well.”

For him, the greatest assets remain the farmers who answered the call for help.

“It was really humbling to see that first thing Saturday morning farmers were pulling in with their excavators and their dump trucks ready to dig rubble,” says Yancey.

“We provided meals in our parking lot here at Wade Farm Financial Services up until May, three times a week,” recounts Wade Smith.

The office also planted a community garden to aid neighborhoods wiped out by the storm.

“In true farmer fashion we help each other out,” says Wade Smith. “When there’s a disaster we all jump in and help our neighbors and this was in that same spirit.”

They gave away free vegetables every Friday and there’s even a winter garden growing right now.

“We’re still giving out fresh vegetables to the neighborhood,” says Wade Smith.

It’s a helping hand, as farmers and the agricultural industry work to piece, not only itself but an entire community back together.

“I still tear up when I drive around in town,” says Wade Smith. “It’s really hard to get or head around it all. I grew up in this community. I’ve lived here almost my entire life. You don’t know where you are. All of the landmarks are gone. The street signs are gone. The churches are gone. The buildings are gone. You don’t even know where you are a lot of the time and it’s still really devastating.”

Yet, bit by bit, piece by piece, Mayfield is reclaiming its future and forging a bond stronger than any tornado can tear apart.

The Night Devastation Hit: Recounting Stories from the Mayfield Tornado One Year Later

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 13:20:20 GMT

On December 10, 2021, an EF4 tornado brought devastation to Mayfield, Ky.

“Since Tuesday of that week, we had been hearing on the local weather stations, that something could possibly be headed our way,” recalls Kathy O’Nan, mayor of Mayfield.

“As that grew closer, and especially on that day, as the day went on, they became more intense.”

As the warnings become more dire, O’Nan knew the forecasters’ plea to take cover was one she should heed.

“I’ve never been in my basement before for a storm, never,” says O’Nan. “I’m not afraid of a storm. I’m still not afraid of a storm, but this was different. I so firmly believe that meteorologists, the local weather service at Paducah, they saved lives that night.”

O’Nan says once she knew it was safe, she returned upstairs from her basement and assessed the damage outside.

“I live four blocks from town and had no damage whatsoever, but I heard it, and so I foolishly thought, you know, maybe we’ve escaped this,” says O’Nan

Then, the calls started to come in, and as first responders began to wade through the rubble, they started to see the scars left behind.

“When Chief Creason came back, he said, ‘Kathy, it’s just awful. It’s bad,’” she remembers.

“The only light source in downtown was one light, running off the generator at the fire station that had been severely damaged during the tornado,” says David Anderson, CEO of Jackson Purchase Medical Center, the hospital in Mayfield. “So, everyone who was in a structure downtown that was damaged or destroyed, the only place they could see to go was to city hall.”

With some structures still standing but severely damaged, with just yards away other buildings barely touched, the calculus of destruction to this rural town was cruelly selective.

“We have a residential area, just north of it starts right at city hall and extends northward. And all those homes were just gone,” says O’Nan with tears in her eyes. “You couldn’t even tell where homes had been, it looked to me like if you’ve ever opened a box of matches and forced it open, and they all spill out on the floor, and it’s just a jumble, it just looked like a jumble of wood to me.”

Just two miles from downtown Mayfield, the hospital escaped a direct hit. The original path had the hospital in the tornado’s path, but a slight shift sent the tornado through downtown instead.

“It was before 9:45 p.m. before the first eight victims showed up, and they were all soaking wet and muddy,” says Anderson.

He says the 107-bed hospital was left with only emergency power, but that didn’t stop the team at the hospital, as the staff sprung into action in the most miraculous way.

“Probably the thing I’ll never forget about that night is we didn’t make a single phone call to staff to have them come to the hospital that night,” says Anderson. “They just came. I would say almost every one of my radiology staff, probably 25 people, they knew they needed to come.”

A team trained to handle crisis did just that. Before the sun even rose, a community in shock, unleashed a rapid response, and one neither O’Nan and Anderson will forget.

“As soon as the wind stopped blowing, that immediately started happening,” says O’Nan.

“There was no tension in the air among our staff. There was a peace and a calm and just a resolve to get through everything that we needed to get through,” Anderson remembers. “And I’ve never been more proud; I’ve never been more humbled by their commitment to this community, and the way they fulfilled their role that night in the way that they did.”

Even when then desperate calls came in for more help, the community didn’t quit. And while many unexpected calls came that night, one call was a conversation that took Anderson by surprise. It was from the president of Lifepoint Health , which owns and operates the hospital in Mayfield. With that call, Anderson quickly learned Mayfield wasn’t in this fight alone.

“He said, ‘Listen, I just have a few things I need to tell you. First of all, there is a generator truck coming to the hospital to help restore power,’ and I had heard of this generator truck that we have, but I didn’t really have an idea what the full capability of it was. And he said, ‘I’m sending 8,000 gallons of FDA-approved fresh water that’s also rolling towards your hospital and should be there by tonight. It’s fresh and clean, and it’s just as good as you’d ever get out of the tap anywhere.’”

From water to a generator truck, the help sent from Lifepoint Medical included vital lifelines for a community in ruins.

“By Tuesday, we even had our clinics that had no power or water, going again,” says Anderson

This rural hospital cared for 111 patients the hours after the tornado struck Mayfield. Triage also set up in a couple of places across town. The emergency response was swift and dire as the tornado claimed 24 lives in Mayfield, Graves county on December 10, 2021.

“The morning of the 10th we are going to do a walk for remembrance, and we have special t-shirts that we put together for our staff who want to do that. I imagine it’s going to pretty heavy that day,” says Anderson.

As Mayfield remembers those lives that were lost, the response that flooded in from across the nation has been fuel for this rural town the past year.

“Like what started that night and continues to happen, here came help,” says O’Nan. “Our county school system was there immediately with a bus and the superintendent, just people filling in. It just proves what we’ve always known about people here in this community, and now what the entire nation and world knows, it proves that everybody’s your neighbor. It doesn’t matter if we don’t agree, we just want to help.”

While so much has been done in the year since the tornado hit, Mayfield has a long road of recovery still ahead. To help with the long-term recovery efforts, you can donate here .

Christmas Comeback

Kentucky Farmers and Ag Industry Still Cleaning Up a Year After December 10 Tornado

The Night Devastation Hit: Recounting Stories from the Mayfield Tornado One Year Later

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