By mid-morning, Wes Fowler, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Mayfield, was walking through what remained of his church building, torn to pieces by the devastating tornado that ripped through Mayfield Friday night.
“What I’ve already told our church is we teach and preach it and now we have to live it — the campus and facility is not the church. It’s the people.”
Fowler didn’t yet know if any of his parishioners were in the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory — where the roof collapsed on third shift workers — but said that the town would make it through.
“I really think the Lord will somehow use this tragedy for good,” he said. “I just don’t know how yet.”
No one knows how to process this type of shock and grief — that in such a short time, so much can be lost. As clean-up begins and funerals are planned, there are hard questions that will be have to be asked: Why, with so many warnings, was the third shift on duty at the candle factory? When will we start to come to grips with the climate crisis that hurled a 200-mile swathe of destruction across our state?
Those questions are for later. Today, says Mark Walter, is the day for shock, and then trying to salvage what’s left. He knows this scene all too well because it happened in West Liberty on March 2, 2012, when a tornado ripped out much of Main Street, killed six people and marched through most of Morgan County in a one-mile width.
“The first pictures from Mayfield just brought back the memories,” said Walter, who is now mayor of West Liberty but was a city council member in 2012. “What brought us through, and what people in Mayfield will see after today is this huge outpouring of care and concern and people coming to our aid. Caring gets us through tragedy, the kind of tragedy we never thought we’d have to go through.”
Humans are amazingly resilient, Walter noted. “At the time, you are truly in shock, but you don’t have any choice but to put on your boots and salvage what’s left,” he said. “Continued support is what really got us through. We still have so many holes on Main Street, but we’ve come a long way and we’re blessed.”
In May 2007, one tornado destroyed 95 percent of tiny Greensburg, Kansas. The scenes of the flattened town are all too similar to what we see today from not just Mayfield, but Dawson Springs and parts of Bowling Green.
“It’s just like us, and everyone will need to step back and go at it day by day,” said Ray Stegman, director of emergency management for Kiowa County. “That’s all you can do in rebuilding.”
Greensburg made more headlines, when city officials decided to rebuild with “green” technology, using wind, solar, and geothermal energy. But, Stegman said, it was a long road. People had to move to surrounding communities, then decide whether they wanted to rebuild in Greensburg. “It’s very difficult. You have to start over with nothing.”
Places like Mayfield have already faced a long road with a loss of businesses and people, a depopulation that began in the 1950s. Back then, it was a thriving town centered around the Court Square that was destroyed Friday night. Major faith communities, which are usually the bedrock in crisis, are facing their own; First Baptist, First Presbyterian and the Methodist Church were decimated. The grand old courthouse lost its familiar cupola.
“The courthouse was the center, as it is in many small towns; it had always been so symbolic of the place” said author Bobbie Ann Mason, one of Mayfield’s most famous native daughters. The movie of her novel “In Country,” was filmed in front of the courthouse. In high school, she worked as a soda jerk at the Rexall Drug Store on the corner of Court Square.
Early Saturday, Mason was watching TV of the tragedy, they said an old hospital north of town had been destroyed. “That’s where I was born,” she said. “I had been absorbing this, and finally I started to cry.”
Many more tears will be shed as, just two weeks before Christmas, we learn the full toll of human loss from these storms. In a state already mourning so many losses from COVID, more children will have lost their parents, while parents have lost children. Right now, all we can do is follow Mayor Walter’s advice: Send prayers, send thoughts, and send money. And keep it all coming. For a long, long time.
