Combine operators harvesting crops frequently stop so workers can jump out and clear debris from their path. Residents have moved some rubble too large to remove without help to the neighborhood’s roadsides. Many homes bear visible damage. Some are missing altogether.
With months and perhaps years of rebuilding ahead, the community first moved to build anew alongside nearby Lone Oak Road: a large steel cross meant to memorialize the seven people killed, including two children, that Memorial Day weekend after the storms touched down.
“It’s just tragic,” said Ray Fletcher, the county’s emergency manager.
People who live along and frequent this stretch of Cooke County, including those in the city of Valley View, are still recovering from the evening of May 25, when high-wind storms and tornadoes blew through the area, damaging hundreds of structures and upending many lives.
Many signs of the storm remain. Though the cleanup and recovery are far from over, officials say, the full scope of the damage has come into focus. Nearly 140 homes were destroyed, with more than 200 others reported as having “major” damage, said Fletcher, citing state damage survey data.
But residents say some things have changed in the weeks since the storms. Valley View’s John Fortenberry Community Center, which had been central to the area’s rapid distribution of resources in the days after the storms hit, has resumed its normal operations. Things are quieter, with fewer outsiders passing through to gawk and record the devastation. The frequent visits of work trucks with roaring engines have decreased as repairs have been completed.
On a recent dry day in Frf Estates, one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by the storms, chickens clucked and generators hummed. The neighborhood is still almost as messy as it was immediately after the devastation — or at least it feels that way to some residents.
A majority of the streets are cleared, and debris that the tornado ripped from houses and yards and then dropped on its warpath was pushed to the edges of plots and along ditches. A mix of tree limbs, pieces of homes and cars, and tattered memories of life before the natural disaster sit waiting to be carried away. A shattered handheld mirror, a child’s pink untied shoe missing its pair and damaged washing machines.
“Everything is still the same,” Frf resident Marinda Lynn, 64, said. Pieces of metal and trees sit at the edge of her yard. Blue tarps line the roof of her home and plywood covers the broken windows. “I’m still trying to figure out how to get rid of the debris.”
With help from family, Lynn and her husband, Burt, have tried to make the pile more manageable by burning what they can but the labor is taxing on their bodies, especially in the summer heat.
“There’s also an emotional toll of having to look at what the tornado left every single day,” she said. “You know what I mean?”
The degree to which debris has been relocated to be removed later varies from house to house. Some residents tapped family and friends to help with the removal while some had the means to hire help. Some have relied on a network of volunteers organized by the nonprofit Cooke County Volunteer Organization Active in Disaster, or VOAD.
Beate Hall, who works as a case manager for VOAD, said on Tuesday that of nearly 130 cases where debris removal services were needed, volunteers have closed nearly 40 cases—meaning around 90 cases, some of which require the use of heavy equipment, remained open.
Hall, a pastor who moved to Cooke County two years ago to work at Valley View United Methodist, said that is not due to a lack of volunteers or the community’s willingness to help one another. Instead, she said, it is due to the scale of the storm’s impact.
“When a family had a tragedy or disaster [in Valley View], by the time I’d hear about it, the meal train would be halfway full, the carpool for the kids to go to school would be organized, their fridge would be packed out—we’re so used to being able to have neighbor help neighbor here that normally we just surround that one family or two families that are impacted and just totally take care of everything,” Hall said.
But, with hundreds of homes destroyed and more damaged, that’s “a little bigger than we’re able to take on,” she added.
VOAD remains available to help. It relocated from the community center to Valley View Elementary School, where it works alongside the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster recovery center.
Applications for individual assistance from FEMA are open until Aug. 15. Fletcher said Friday that $4.6 million from FEMA had been allocated toward recovery efforts in southern Cooke County, where Frf Estates is located.
A county-led effort to dispose of the remaining debris is forthcoming. The Cooke County commissioner’s court on Monday will review bids and consider selecting a contractor to perform the job, which Fletcher says may take until December to complete.
Amber Lidster, another Frf Estates resident, lost her entire home in the tornado. The foundation and some contents were left behind.
Although Lidster, 43, said there’s a less immediate need for the debris on her land to be removed until she decides and purchases her new home. She said she struggles to look at what’s left of the worst day of her life over and over again.
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