She spent Tuesday afternoon cleaning up some of her belongings from a home where she can no longer live.
Whiteland resident Carolyn King rented her home near the intersection of Waltz Street and Pearl Street for a decade. Now, all she has left of it are memories and a few items she was able to salvage after an EF-3 tornado struck her neighborhood last week.
“My husband stood at the screen door and said ‘Carolyn, the rain is going sideways.’ And then, a couple of seconds later, he said, ‘it just changed direction, it’s going the other way.’ So I came to the door and I saw the rotation,” King said. “He said ‘get to the bathroom.’ We had a millisecond. He slammed the door and braced himself against the wall and put his foot on the door of the bathroom. About the time it hit, it sounded like a freight train, and it felt like the pressure was raising us up.”
King said she was afraid the storm would take them with it, but they escaped unscathed. She has spent time at shelters at Whiteland Community High School and Greenwood Middle School. Now staying with her sister, she doesn’t know what will happen next, but has witnessed the generosity of the community. She’s gotten food and water from Johnson County Senior Services and Chick-Fil-A and has seen strangers offer to help her in the aftermath of the storm, which destroyed 16 Whiteland homes.
“(Monday) there were six or seven people beside us. They came in and they got everything out of there,” King said. “I had to get a storage unit, and while I was there signing the paperwork, a man was there. He heard us talking about being through the tornado and when (the storage manager) told me how much it was he said ‘let me pay that.’”
Throughout the community, hundreds of volunteers have included individuals who have signed up to clean up debris through United Way of Johnson County, members of county agencies such as the Franklin Fire Department and the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office, and Clark-Pleasant Community School Corporation, including school district staff members and the Whiteland Community High School volleyball team.
Kennedi Morrison, a junior, rallied her team of about 20 girls to clean up debris Tuesday near Woods Lane between Waltz Street and State Street. The teens had the day off from school, it was important to use that time to help their hometown, Morrison said.
“It’s really sad seeing the devastation that’s happened, but it’s really nice to see that communities are coming together and we can all work together to help other people,” she said. “We just wanted to help the community.”
Near the volleyball team, Sgt. Michael Watt of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department also cleaned up the debris. Tuesday was supposed to be a training day for the Johnson County bomb squad, but instead, the squad was sent to help with cleanup efforts, Watt said.
“I live just down the road, so it’s my community,” Watt said. “I wanted to make sure to come out and help my people. You see the destruction and it’s bad. I actually spent 24 years in the Army and I went to help with Hurricane Katrina relief in New Orleans and Mississippi. I’m getting a lot of the same feelings just of the devastation and a lot of people are going to take a long time to recover from it.”
About 15 members of the Franklin Fire Department also traveled to Whiteland to help out, said Cole McKnight, president of local union 3433.
“We think it’s a great thing to help a neighboring department because we know they would do the same thing for us,” McKnight said. “They have done it before on major incidents such as when the flood happened in Franklin in 2008; agencies came to our aid. We want to be the good citizens we are and help a neighboring agency.”
Fire departments from Greenwood, Franklin, Whiteland, New Whiteland, White River Township and Bargersville helped with initial search operations, and police departments as far as Southport, Indianapolis and Bartholomew County helped with traffic control and ensuring people were out of harm’s way, Johnson County Sheriff Duane Burgess said.
The collaborative work between departments has been a huge help for Whiteland during a time of need, said Eric Funkhouser, the town’s fire chief.
“One of the greatest things about Johnson County is the good, working relationship. When something like this happens, everyone pitches in,” Funkhouser said. “People don’t worry about boundary lines, they want to make sure we’re taking care of everyone in the county.”
United Way of Johnson County helped organize a one-stop shop for resource information at the Clark-Pleasant Administration Building. People who had been displaced stopped by for information on temporary housing and others signed up to volunteer. Access Johnson County provided details on transportation options. People at the center were able to sign up 154 volunteers to help out Tuesday, cleaning up wreckage and manning the administration building to assist people who stopped by, said Becky Allen, transportation director for Access Johnson County.
The kindness of strangers has been a sign of community togetherness for Clayton Smith, owner of Just Lift It, which had its fabrication shop, including lifts, tire wheel machines, welding machines and nine cars destroyed by the tornado. The main shop location, on 650 E. Main St., is still standing.
“All the surrounding communities have been here every day and every one of them has lent a hand to get all these people a place to stay, food to eat and water to drink,” Smith said. “All these people on Pearl Street, they lost their home. I can still go home, but they can’t. We can go get materialistic things, you know, the welders, the tools, everything we can repurchase. You can’t purchase history, family photos.”
Down Main Street just east of U.S. 31, HeavenEarth Church became a spot for supplies, such as new clothes, blankets, diapers and hygiene items, paper towels, toilet paper, cleaning buckets, tarps, food, water, flashlights and batteries. The church, open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day, serves as a supply pickup and drop off location, and still needs power banks, first aid kits, dog and cat food and hand sanitizing wipes, said Ross Stackhouse, pastor.
The disaster shows just how fragile life is and the need for empathy and compassion, he said.
“You look at the guy who’s experiencing homelessness, and, myself included, you have your assumptions and judgement,” Stackhouse said. “This shows you real quick, when you’re looking at the guy living in low-income housing, you’re not as far from homelessness as you think you are.”
