89 minutes of terror: How May 16 tornado killed 19 and changed London forever

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3 days ago

In the end, the modest brick house that had sheltered June Bacelier Fisher for decades simply wasn't enough.
The 74-year-old had lived in the Sunshine Hills neighborhood outside London, Kentucky, for 50 years and known it all her life. It was once her family's farm, acres of rolling hills and towering trees.
As a young widow, Fisher returned to the land and built a house at the bottom of one of the hills in front of a gently flowing creek. She raised her two children in the three-bedroom house.
She worked at First National Bank in London, gardened in her yard and worshiped at Pine Grove Baptist Church.
But late on the night of May 16, the hills provided no haven.
A funnel cloud that had barreled through the Daniel Boone National Forest reached the back of the subdivision. It was a monster nearly a mile wide, picking up speed and energy as it snapped huge trees into twigs.
It reached the edge of Sunshine Hills, crested the hill and swept down, winds raging at a catastrophic 170 mph.
Fisher's house lay directly in its path at the bottom of the hill. In just minutes, Fisher and eight of her neighbors were dead as the ugly storm roared across Laurel County like a runaway locomotive.
Just after the tornado ravaged the subdivision, witnesses said everything turned quiet.
But just for a moment.
Then the screams began.
The storm system had started in southeastern Missouri around 4:30 p.m. on Friday, May 16.
The weather had been so unsettled that day, with cool fronts colliding into warm ones, that an entirely different system had spawned a series of tornadoes in St. Louis. One E3 twister entered the Fountain Park neighborhood there, killing one woman and damaging more than 5,000 buildings there.
The southeastern system that started closer to Cape Girardeau that Friday afternoon quickly jumped across the Mississippi River. By 6:54 CDT, it was about to begin a 500-mile trail of wind, rain, hail and tornadoes across the bottom of Kentucky.
It was headed to London.
'The parent storm system, it was very strong and organized,' said Jane Marie Wix, a warning coordination meteorologist for National Weather Service in Jackson, Kentucky.
'It had a lot of energy, and as it moved eastward, it stayed organized. It had a good rotation, and every once in a while, it would drop a tornado.'
At 6:54 p.m. CDT, an EF1 tornado touched down in the Lamasco community near Lake Barkley, uprooting trees and destroying a barn, according to the National Weather Service. It was about 240 miles from London.
By 7:42 p.m., an EF2 twister with 120 mph winds crossed into Todd County, where it destroyed one home and damaged another. It also wiped out four large poultry houses on a farm, according to the county emergency manager, William Randolph.
There were no injuries or deaths.
The storm then passed Bowling Green, which had been devastated by a December 2021 tornado that killed more than a dozen people in the city, then headed eastward toward Lake Cumberland, skirting along the Louie B. Nunn Cumberland Parkway.
It stayed organized and became quite strong.
Chris Bailey, the chief meteorologist at WKYT-TV in Lexington, marveled that the track of the parent storm, a lone super-cell, went more than 500 miles from Missouri to almost Pikeville, producing tornadoes much of the way.
'It went due east like a bowling ball across Southern Kentucky,' he said.
'It was spinning the entire time, which is crazy to see. I can remember tracking it around 6 p.m. and saying, 'London, Corbin, Somerset, if this thing holds together, you're going to have trouble.''
Trouble arrived after darkness had fallen.
After traveling hundreds of miles, the storm spawned its largest tornado up to that point. At 10:27 p.m. (EDT), the giant twister set down in Russell County.
The first call to the local 911 center about the storm noted a 63-year-old man required an ambulance after a recreational vehicle flipped over.
It knocked down trees and barns, destroyed camper trailers — including a 35-foot long unit that authorities hadn't found more than a week later — and damaged or destroyed 50 homes, said Michael 'Toe Joe' Bray, the county emergency manager.
The National Weather Service said the tornado first hit in the Stephens Ridge area in the western part of Laurel County, then tore across the county east toward Pulaski County, Bray said..
Despite close calls — including one in which the tornado blew a 98-year-old man out of his bed and left only half of his bedroom standing — there were no deaths in Russell County. There were a few minor injuries, but, miraculously, nobody had died.
That would soon change.
Pulaski County was in the crosshairs next.
The tornado hit the Faubush and Nancy communities in the rural western part of the county, damaging or destroying houses and barns.
The first call to the local 911 center came in at 10:46 p.m. from a resident in Nancy, who reported a tree had fallen on the middle of a house and people were trapped inside.
But the storm saved its stiffest jab for Somerset, where it churned through a commercial area, damaging or destroying at least 20 businesses.
Those included the Somerset Cinemas 8, where there were about 100 people watching movies when the tornado hit, ripping a large air-conditioning unit from the roof and damaging the roof and a wall, said the manager, Joe Cusmai.
Cusmai said he and a security guard got patrons into the safest spots in the hallway and bathrooms.
'There was definite fear' on the part of some patrons, he said.
There were additional tornado warnings after that.
'They didn't know what was coming next,' Cusmai said of customers.
A security camera at a business called Prof Fab Inc., captured video of transformers on utility poles at U.S. 27 and Parkers Mill Road exploding a few seconds after 11:01 p.m., with debris flying toward the camera.
Connie Mills, a restaurant server who had gotten off work a little earlier, said she and her brother, Mike Garland, were trying to get to shelter when the tornado hit his van as they were stopped at the intersection.
The tornado picked the van up off the road briefly and blew out all the windows.
'Just out of the blue, it was so terrifying,' said Mills, 61. 'It was like a herd of bulls was coming through that van.'
Unexpectedly, word came that a second potential tornado could hit the area. First responders — Mills couldn't remember if they were police or firefighters — hustled them into the bathroom of a Hardee's restaurant at the intersection.
They sprawled out on the floor for about 20 minutes until the danger passed.
There was a family in the bathroom who had lost everything, Mills said.
'You never want to go through it again,' she said.
Nobody died in Somerset.
But local authorities said they shuddered to think how many people might have perished if the tornado had veered slightly north into subdivisions along Parkers Mill Road, or touched down during the day. That's when the businesses along south U.S. 27 would have been bustling with employees and customers.
The reprieve didn't last long.
As the storm continued east and approached the rural, hilly Mount Victory community in eastern Pulaski County, Melodie Godby and her husband Dave left their home, which doesn't have a basement.
They went to the home of a close friend, Doris Arnold, about three miles away on Poplarville Road. He and his wife were going to Arnold's house to take shelter, Godby said.
Shortly after arriving at the old farmhouse overlooking Buck Creek, the roar of the wind picked up dramatically and the three headed to the basement.
Dave Godby went first. The 93-year-old Arnold followed.
Melodie Godby, who had trouble getting around at times, started down, but then sat on the steps, her husband said.
That's when the tornado tore the house to pieces.
Or, as the county coroner said later, the house 'exploded.'
The tornado had reached category EF-3, with winds of 136 to 165 miles per hour, at points before hitting the house, the National Weather Service said later.
Dave Godby was pummeled and cut by flying debris and knocked unconscious. When he came to later, he was looking up at black sky and asked Arnold about his wife.
'She said, 'Honey, she's gone,' ' Godby said. 'I just started hollering 'Melodie!' '
Godby was bruised and cut and and couldn't walk. He and Arnold spent the rest of the night in the basement sitting on a piece of wood, shivering cold as it continued to rain on them at times.
It took firefighters several hours to cut through trees blocking the roads and reach them.
They pulled Godby and Arnold from the rubble of splintered wood, concrete blocks and personal belongings surrounding them in the basement.
They found Melodie Gibson's body in the yard under more debris.
Her husband, a pastor at a small, non-denominational Christian church, believes God has a purpose in everything.
'I really believe the Lord wanted her to come on home,' he said of his wife. 'You don't even know that it's your last day.'
The tornado continued up the picturesque valley behind Arnold's house, snapping off trees on the shoulders of hills on both sides, and slammed into the home of Tammy and Robert Watkins on KY 192.
Tammy Watkins said she and her husband were in a closet praying when the tornado hit. It tore off part of the roof and turned the inside of the house into a whirlwind of debris.
'That thing was gigantic and it just kept going around and around and stuff flying,' she said. 'You're right there at death's door and you think you're gonna leave this world.'
After the storm passed, the road was thick with fallen trees so they couldn't go anywhere. They spent the rest of the night in their pickup truck and stayed there for several more nights until folks at New Life Church in Ferguson brought them a camper, Watkins said.
'It's only by God's grace and mercy we're alive.'
The tornado kept churning.
Maybe the only reason it didn't claim more lives was the long stretch of sparsely inhabited land in the Daniel Boone National Forest between Somerset and London.
But it did level thousands of trees, shelters, roads and probably wildlife as it swept across almost 30,000 acres of forest. London District Ranger Jason Nedlo said the storm crossed 47 miles of Forest Service roads and four miles of trails.
It picked up more energy across that stretch, said the Weather Service's Wix, who surveyed the forest lands the day after.
'That's where we got the mile-wide tracks,' she said. 'I'll never get over it — driving through miles and miles of broken trees is pretty crazy.'
By now it was an EF 3, which covers wind speeds between 136 and 165 miles per hour, and it was moving fast out of the forest and into the outer neighborhoods of Laurel County.
By about 11 p.m., Bailey, the chief meteorologist at WKYT in Lexington, looked into the camera and addressed the children.
'I put a hard hat on and was trying to calm them down on air, telling them exactly what I wanted them do: cover their heads and take shelter,' he said.
But staring at the radar screen, he felt sick.
His predictions were correct.
The twister began its killing spree in Laurel County about 11:35 p.m. at 307 Hart Church Road.
Its winds sent a tree onto the house of 47-year-old Tiffany Heim, a horticulturalist who had spent much of her free time planting trees with the Green Forests Work organization. She was killed immediately.
The first call to the London-Laurel County 911 dispatch center came from a home on Hart Church Road at 11:48 p.m.
A woman said she 'was just hit by the tornado' and she and family members were trapped in the house, according to the log at the center.
On nearby Wyan Road, Bobby and Bernice Tillman huddled under mattresses at the house they'd only lived in for a year. Their bodies were found under the mattresses amid the wreckage of their house. Bobby Tillman, 76, a U.S. Navy veteran, and Bernice, 73, had been married 55 years.
At nearly a mile wide, the thundering twister crested the hill in the rear of the Sunshine Hills subdivision and did its deadliest work.
Nine people died that night in Sunshine Hills, where the tornado reached its top wind speed, an estimated 170 mph.
It was 'devastating,' meteorologists would describe the system.
Judging from the direction of the tornado, it hit the houses of Les Leatherman, the emergency official whose body was found huddled over that of his wife, Michelle, who remains at the University of Kentucky hospital in fair condition.
Pamela Mason was sheltering in the hallway of her house with her beloved dog, Buddy. They were both swept out of the house.
Mason was killed, but Buddy's leash tethered him to a tree, where he was found by a police officer, battered but alive, according to Mason's son-in-law, David Scott.
Nancy Clem and Ray Cowan's houses were across the street from June Fisher on the downsweep of the storm at its height. Both of them were killed.
June Fisher was found in her bedroom with a Bible devotional in her hands.
'She was a very strong and independent woman,' said Wes Clark, her son-in-law.
Just the weekend before, Clark and his wife, Jennifer, had taken Fisher to Nashville to see her grandson, Aaron Johnson, graduate from Vanderbilt.
'She loved her family and we loved her,' Clark said.
Nancy Clem had been going through kidney dialysis, one of many fights in life she had, one of her friends said.
The tornado kept moving up the hill to Boone Trail where it smashed into Darlene Miller's home, killing her. She had worked in a nursing home for 40 years, her friends said.
It also slammed into the home of Richard and Wanda McFalls, known for dressing as Santa and Mrs. Claus at Christmas. They both died.
Retired teacher Sherri Smith was killed in her home on Saddle Drive, just up the hill from the McFalls.
Smith, 68, had worked 27 years as an English teacher before retiring, then came back as a substitute teacher. She loved literature, plays, animals and her students.
One former student put a photo of himself in her casket with the message 'Thank you for believing in me.'
All these people loved and were loved. In a matter of minutes they were all gone.
And yet, amid all this death and destruction, tiny miracles popped up in the darkness.
The Warren family of five sheltered in their bathroom and survived.
Jennifer Adams and her sons were blown out their house as the entire structure blew away. They got by with minor bruises and scratches.
The Monday after the storm, Nicholas Mays was still shaking as he recounted covering his two sons with his body in the bathroom, as his wife protected their daughter.
Her parents and their 5-year-old niece were staying in the RV just outside. The storm crushed the Mays' house and rolled the RV into the next door neighbor's retaining wall. Yet everyone was OK.
It just happened so fast, Mays recalled.
'When you hear the freight train, it's too late,' he said, fighting back tears.
Another miracle? That the storm and its wall of debris didn't hurt anyone as it crossed I-75 just outside Sunshine Hills.
A Greyhound bus heading north on Interstate 75 from Atlanta to Cincinnati miraculously avoided what surely would have been a fatal collision with the twister.
The driver, Pam Redding, told the Herald-Leader she had left a stop in Knoxville at 10:10 p.m. with about 35 passengers, with a stop scheduled in London at midnight.
South of London, she got an alert on her phone about the storm and started looking for an underpass to pull under, which is what drivers are trained to do.
She couldn't find one.
She was less than five miles from London and decided to get off the road to safety there, Redding said.
About two miles south of the exit, flying debris started hitting the side of the bus. Lightning was crashing, wind was buffeting the big Prevost vehicle and there were cars with windows shattered out along the interstate, Redding said.
'It was a really frightening situation,' she said.
Redding was able to get to Exit 38 and into the lot of the Burger King which serves as the stop in London. She hurried the passengers off the bus and into the store to wait for the storm to pass.
'We were all just shook up,' Redding said.
There was a warning of another possible tornado as they sat at the Burger King.
With continued heavy rain and closing time approaching at the restaurant, Redding decided to head north to try to get past the storm. The passengers agreed, she said, and they pulled out at 1:15 a.m.
'Let's just get out of London,' was the thought, Redding said.
Weakened because of changing moisture conditions in the environment, the twister refused to give up.
It still was wreaking havoc in Laurel County.
By about 11:45 p.m., it had barreled into the house of the three Sweet siblings on Old Whitley Road. Linda Sweet and Gary Sweet were both killed; their brother Billy escaped with severe injuries.
Then it blew through the London airport, mangling several hangars and other structures.
Carla Hill and her family took shelter at her workplace, a manufacturing center near the airport, because she thought it would be safer than their single-wide trailer, she told the Herald-Leader.
Her son, Marshall Miracle, 25, an ardent weather watcher, caught sight of the tornado as they sheltered in the bathroom there.
'It's huge,' he told her.
Seconds later, the roof collapsed on top of them.
Hill and her husband survived, but Miracle died at the scene.
The tornado then crossed U.S. 25 and hit neighborhoods near the former Levi Jackson State Park, including an apartment building. Lisa Fortney, 51, died there with her boyfriend, Kenneth Elliott.
But just past the apartment building, in the direct path of the tornado, Amerah and James Taylor survived with cuts when it destroyed their house.
They got into the shower on the first floor of their home as the storm howled down on them.
They felt the home shake, then were sucked into the air as the house disintegrated.
'One second the house was fine, the next was an explosion,' said James Taylor, an accountant.
'It was definitely one of the scariest moments of our lives,' his wife said.
The wind blew them into the yard, where a piece of metal fell on them and helped protect them from the blanket of debris.
They could hear people screaming for help behind their house coming from the direction of the apartment building.
The two, who married in November and moved into the house in December, lost their wedding bands, which had been hanging on a hook. The house was stripped to the subfloor.
Nonetheless, they were grateful.
'We should not have survived this. It was strictly by God that we survived,' said Amerah Taylor, a high-school physical education teacher.
The tornado finally lost energy and surrendered just past the Crooked Creek Golf Course.
Wix said they couldn't find damage past the intersection of highways 488 and 80.
'The further east you go, you get blocked by mountains for moisture flow,' she said. 'It couldn't sustain itself forever.'
By 11:56 p.m., the tornado had lifted off the ground, though its mother storm kept barreling toward the mountains.
The fatal twister was on the ground 89 minutes and covered 59.9 miles across the belly of Kentucky.
But London's longest night was not over.
By midnight, emergency personnel were already clearing roads to get to the victims around the counties.
Kelly Helton, director of critical care at St. Joseph Hospital in London, had sheltered at her house with her husband and five children.
At 12:46 a.m., she got the text from work: MASS CASUALTY EVENT.
In her mind, Helton flashed back to 2012, when an EF 2 tornado with winds estimated at 125 miles per hour hit Laurel County, killing six people.
She was 24 hours post-partum at the hospital that day. She handed the baby to her husband, put on her shoes and raced to the emergency room to help.
Just like then, she now turned to her husband and eldest son and said, 'It's time to go.'
By the time they got to the ER, about 70 people, those hurt and those sheltering, were filling the space. An orthopedic surgeon called, 'I need some help in here,' and Helton set to work.
Her husband and son went into triage, directing family members to waiting rooms upstairs. Helton said because of years of preparation since 2012, the 'controlled chaos' that May 16 night worked incredibly well.
'It was pretty amazing to watch it run like a well-oiled machine,' she said.
Patients were sent by helicopter and ambulance to the University of Kentucky, while surgery rooms were prepared at the hospital
'It looks like a war zone,' Helton said.
'You make eye contact with people and there's blood, they're hurt, they're scared, they don't know if their family knows their alive. There's all this disbelief and fear.
'At the same time, you see all these other people, the housekeepers, the supply chain people, working so hard and so diligently to get us what we needed. It was amazing.'
Surgeon Nicholas Capal got to the hospital at about 12:30 a.m., and immediately went to work. He put chest tubes into two patients with broken ribs. Others were coming in with 'mangled extremities,' and various degrees of trauma.
'That's what we're trained to do in events where you're completely overwhelmed — quickly trying to establish who is most critical, triaging them, knowing where to send them,' he said.
'Everyone did a pretty incredible job at that.'
Doctors from other St. Joseph hospitals drove in as the night wore on to help save lives.
Officials said roughly 83 people were served in the first wave, with 11 in serious enough condition they were sent by helicopter and ambulance to the University of Kentucky.
In all, exhausted doctors, nurses, surgeons and specialists tended to the medical needs of more than 100 people May 16 and throughout the early hours of May 17.
The dying wasn't over, however.
As in many other places, the storm had knocked out power in Russell County.
Around 8 a.m. Saturday, May 17, 93-year-old Debra Edelman asked a neighbor to start the generator on her houseboat at State Dock on Lake Cumberland.
Later that day, at about 4 p.m. local time, a neighbor on the dock went to check on Edelman. She was dead.
Edelman was overcome by carbon monoxide from the generator, said the county coroner, Mark Coots.
State authorities counted the death as storm related.
'If it hadn't been for the storm, she wouldn't have been running the generator,' Coots said.
Edelman was from Richmond, Indiana. She and her husband, Jack, who died in 2017, owned successful recycling businesses and had given millions to various charitable causes, including youth programs, education and a hospital, according to her obituary and a local newspaper.
'She was a sweet lady, from what I've been able to gather,' Coots said.
Like Edelman, the May 16 tornado has many ancillary tragedies.
The hundreds of people with trauma from that night, who may have lost everything.
Emergency officials now say 1,500 homes were destroyed or damaged. It will cost at least $60 million to rebuild, Gov. Andy Beshear said.
In his request to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Beshear asked for disaster assistance for individuals and households in eight counties: Caldwell, Christian, Laurel, Pulaski, Russell, Trigg, Todd and Union.
This aid can help the many people who didn't have insurance.
Nicholas Mays, his wife Tyneal, and his three children have been staying in a friend's house since May 16, and just found a bigger house to rent in Corbin.
The FEMA inspector met them at Sunshine Hills on May 29.
'She was wonderful, super compassionate,' he said. 'She asked about clothes, furniture, things I had not thought about.'
That's a huge relief to the Mays family. Like other victims, they had been struggling since their home was destroyed.
The afternoon before the tornado, Tyneal Mays, graduated with a bachelor's degree in laboratory medical science from Eastern Kentucky University and had been offered a job.
The job is still there, as is Nicholas's at the Kentucky Consular Center in Williamsburg, which offered him plenty of time off to recover.
The Mays have three children, 8, 6, and 4.
To the four-year-old girl, it's been one big adventure where 'Daddy saved us from the storm!' Nicholas recounted. But the eight and six-year-olds are still traumatized.
'When I told (the six-year-old) about the new house, he asked me about what it was made of — bricks, rock, concrete,' Mays said.
'He was counting to see how many things there were for safety. And he has tremendous separation anxiety, always saying 'Mom, Dad, where are you?
'It just broke our hearts completely, knowing they'll both have to carry this the rest of their lives.'
On May 29, two weeks to the day, another tornado hit Washington County, killing one and destroying three houses. It brought it all back to their son.
Mays now says 'in some maniacal twist of fate, it was an incredible blessing in a terrible disguise.'
He and his wife had always talked about leaving Appalachia, feeling sometimes shut out from the community or that it was too close-minded.
'Then this thing happened, we lost everything we've ever owned and total strangers are walking up and handing me $100 bills,' he said.
He started to cry.
'I'm so blown away, I'm humbled, we want to stay here forever because people have been so good to us.
'I feel indebted to this area,' he said. 'All I can think about is community.'
In the end, that community was stronger than the tornado.