This will be my last blog from the U.S.A. for awhile as my wife and I leave tomorrow for England, returning in mid-September. It has been great, visiting my daughter and husband as well as my son and his family, all in the Toledo area. As I said in my last blog, it is great to come home to Ohio this lovely time of year, although the heat is beginning to generate now.
My son-in-law yesterday took us on an auto tour of "the war zone", the area in Lake Township, Wood County, Ohio, around and in Millbury, the scene of the devastating tornado of June 5 and 6 which killed six people and damaged or destroyed at least fifty homes and businesses. It really is a war zone, out of a World War I movie: jagged and bent trees with their tops shorn off pepper the landscape. You drive into Millbury, a hamlet of 1500, and drive down the main drag and you see a lot of small but neat ranch homes, a typical midAmerica setting---and, suddenly, on the next block, homes are totally wiped out or damaged beyond repair. Blue tarps on roofs are plentiful, with boarded-up windows. The capricious nature of tornados astonishes me: on the same street, on one side, homes are unscathed or with minimal damage, while on the other side devastation reigns. Tornadoes play hop-scotch, jumping across fields, missing a farmhouse but wiping out the barn fifty feet from the house, or, as often, the opposite---erasing the house and leaving the barn.
The fact that it happened late at night made the horror story even worse. How many tales I've heard of last-second dives into cellars, just in time to save lives while the home is destroyed. One poor woman, in a wheelchair with M.S., was pulled by the legs down basement stairs by her husband with her 12-year old son right behind. Then they heard a deafening crack. The husband took a flashlight and shined it upwards and saw only blackness---and then realized it was the sky. Their home was gone with only rubble surrounding the basement stairs.
It is a very personal story for my daughter and her husband. They once lived in Millbury and now live only two miles away in Northwood, Ohio, so they have many friends in the area. Their two daughters went to Lake High School, which I noted in an earlier blog was in good part destroyed by the tornado. Many of their school friends' homes were destroyed. It is a psychological as well as a physical trauma for many.
The community and the area, including the city of Toledo, have responded magnificently and generously with all kinds of help. They have done an incredible job of cleaning up the area. Wood County. Lake Township, is rural, and the fields were filled with debris after the storm. You drive along country roads and are amazed how normal the fields look, except for the broken trees and a new supply of firewood in the yards of many homes.
It is a time to count your blessings if you have been spared such an ordeal. I am confident that the strong-willed industrious people of Lake Township, Wood County have the resiliency to rebound and come back stronger than ever from this ordeal.
Americans have shown those qualities countless times in war and peace. That same resiliency is on display in the gulf states right now, as well, although their fight is just beginning. They too shall survive and rebound.
A good post here. We often hear of these tragedies but get few details. Where I live tornados have been a way of life since I was a child. But they happen everywhere in the midwest and the north-central America.
ReplyDeleteI hope you can post while you're gone. I have come to enjoy reading what you have to say. I hope this vacation is everything you'd want it to be and that you and your good wife have a wonderful time. Take good care.
Enjoy your visit my friend.
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