Tornado aftermath shows us Greensboro residents that we are strong
The next, a sharp whistle and they're ... are they outside now? Is that why their clothes feel so heavy with rain? But they were just ... why is there glass and insulation and drywall on the floor? Where's the kitchen? What's that smell? Gas?
Gill opens her mouth to scream. Nothing comes out.
And so it went
Thirty-seven structures destroyed, another 162 nearly so. Hundreds of people displaced, including students from three elementary schools who will finish out the school year in unfamiliar classrooms.
Consider Gill, her husband, her 20-year-old son. A massive white oak split their home in two. A week later, they have no permanent address, no clothes, no furniture, no renter's insurance with which to replace their belongings.
Gill considers herself lucky.
The vortex spared a sliver of the kitchen where they crouched under a table made of glass. Made. Of. Glass. And no one was hurt.
The house didn't explode, despite the gas leak.
All things considered, she says, it could have been worse.
There's a name for that perspective:
Greensboro Strong.
Surely you've seen the phrase in the past seven days, maybe as a hashtag on social media, or on those green T-shirts everyone's wearing.
Here, it's not some generic marketing slogan -- "(Insert-your-city-here) Strong."
It means something in
Greensboro Strong means we count our blessings even in our darkest times, just like Gill is counting hers.
Oh, it still hurts. Over on
Front windows, shattered. Overhead lights, ripped. Her refrigerator sits on the wrong side of the room, the back walls disconnected from the foundation.
Tormenta. That's the Spanish word for the thing that disrupted her life.
"I cried," Dwyer, a housekeeper, says of the moment she unlocked the front door. "I needed crying. It was very emotional.
"But then I calmed down for a couple of minutes and thought, 'This is marginal. My life is good. My family is good.'"
Her hope? That her insurance company provides enough money to start over, rather than ordering her to rebuild a house with little worth saving.
Here's a question: Why there? Why Dwyer's street, and Gill's street, and not other streets lined with people of means, where paying
That's not to say their losses would be any less tragic. Nor is it to imply the residents somehow deserve such a fate because of their good fortunes.
But it would be different, surmountable, even.
Whether your house or your neighborhood gets hit might be determined by something so basic as the surrounding terrain. Batten says he has noticed that tornadoes seem to track streams, even small ones.
But beyond the affected neighborhoods, life goes on as though the storm never happened, making it hard for people to imagine how difficult it is in the epicenter.
"A city the size of
"Riding around other parts of the city, you'd never know anything had happened."
It can't be true, since storms don't think or feel. But it sure seems like this one had an agenda: taking from communities with the least to give.
The neighborhoods on either side of
Districts 1 and 2 are home to the city's "food deserts," where residents struggle to find food that's healthy and affordable. Median income is too low. Crime is too high. Many people in these mostly black districts -- represented by
The residents are poor. But they're not helpless. For five or six days, they had no power. But they were not powerless.
Before the citywide fundraisers and food drives, before city-operated shuttles deposited volunteers to clean up debris -- east
On Monday morning, 12 or so hours in, many affected areas remained islands, their roads blocked by downed trees and power lines. The Rev.
The big church on
But the church was without power.
Brown called another longtime stalwart in the
Brown asked: Does the county have a generator big enough to power up this kitchen?
No, Alston replied, but maybe we can find one.
With the help of
Here's the thing: New Light is not even in Alston's district.
Greensboro Strong? How about East Greensboro Strong?
That's not to say these storm-ravaged neighborhoods don't want or need help from other parts of
It will take everyone, and then some, to recover. Which is why
That includes the N.C. A&T board of visitors, where she slipped a blue blazer over her green tee before addressing the group.
One unexpected problem that cropped up last week? The sheer number of people aching to do something -- anything -- to help strangers who were hurting.
Early on, local government officials struggled to corral volunteers, begging them to work through the city's command center to keep traffic to a minimum.
City Councilwoman
"Ya'll, this is coming from a place of gratitude and love -- NO MORE BOTTLED WATER! Literally, our cups runneth over! All areas currently have all the water they can use right now."
By week's end, the
"We strongly discourage people from going out with their chain saws and power tools,"
The city's collective nervous energy is all well and good. But the looming crisis will take more than a Saturday afternoon spent collecting debris.
Longtime affordable housing advocate
She watched families pick through belongings inside storm-mangled houses, hoping to salvage something to take to their new homes.
Where are all these people going to live?
"It's an absolute disaster because we already had this enormous shortage of places that people with limited income could afford," she says. "As a community we're going to have to take some really drastic measures."
Solutions to those problems will come in due time. But what of Gill, who lost so much last week but counts herself so blessed?
She can't wait to decorate her family's new home, wherever that may be.
There's a hashtag for that.
#greensborostrong
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