17-05-2025
Miracles survive despite a tornado that stole Laurel County lives, homes, memories
Jennifer Adams was watching the news with her two sons late Friday night, when they got the word to shelter in place.
They ran to the bathroom and closed their eyes as a freight train of roaring wind barreled over their house. When she looked up, she saw sky.
And then she was blown into the yard.
When she looked again, her entire house was gone, torn completely off its foundation.
'This is a miracle from the Lord,' said Adams, sporting just a few cuts and bruises as she looked for keepsakes Saturday morning.
'All the material things can be replaced, but my sons and I ...'
The concrete front porch was cracked in half, and the only thing left was the outline of the house's foundation. Christmas ornaments and children's books had already been bulldozed to the side of the driveway.
'This is where my house was and now it's just gone,' she said in disbelief. 'But we are here.'
Across the street in the Sunshine Hills subdivision, a community in Laurel County, just outside the city limits of London, her neighbor, June Fisher was not so lucky.
Fisher's son-in-law Wes Clark said he and his wife, Jennifer, were driving up from Frankfort early Saturday morning when they got the call that Jennifer's mother had been killed. They, too, searched for papers and mementoes in a tight mound of wreckage at the back of the subdivision.
The 74-year-old June Fisher had lived in her home in Sunshine Hills for the past 50 years.
'I feel like I'm in shock,' Jennifer Clark, as she searched for her mother's purse.
Wes Clark had just wrapped up helping out in Frankfort with the massive flooding that hit that town last month. 'I think we are all in shock.'
Shock and disbelief were on the faces of the weary residents who returned home Saturday morning to salvage what they could, despite officials' attempts to keep people out of dangerous ruins. One woman, still draped in a purple blanket, walked up the main road and rested her head on the hood of a police car.
Angela Boggs walked to the Family Dollar Store next to the subdivision. Her home was barely touched, but she was still without electricity. She clutched her Yorkshire Terrier, Archie, under one arm.
'We had gone to town to be with my daughter when the sirens started going off,' she said. 'It took us four hours to get back here this morning.'
She is still taking in the scale of the devastation around her.
'Three people I talked to yesterday are gone,' she said. 'How can that be?'
While the force of the storm had not yet been categorized on Saturday, its strength was massive — one huge tree was uprooted and came to rest on a camper, its leaves decorated with insulation from a nearby attic, where half the roof was ripped away.
A metal carport now encased a pickup truck as though it had been made of aluminum foil. Utility poles snapped like twigs and sturdy wooden fences were turned into firewood.
Sunshine Hills is comprised of a mixture of brick and wooden houses and mobile homes, but they seemed equally affected.
One brick house was left with only the front wall, its windows reflecting the blue sky behind. Another split open, leaving one wall of kitchen cabinets on the ground, while the stove and refrigerator stood open like a child's playhouse.
And yet, as we see again and again, far too often now across Kentucky, people will keep moving to help their neighbors and themselves. Rescue workers from as far away as Virginia and all across the commonwealth gathered at the nearby Wyan-Pine Elementary school before starting cleanup efforts.
And like Jennifer Clark, sometimes we are reminded of how fate can work in terrible and wonderful ways..
Sharon Philpot was also watching television when the order to shelter came. She went to a downstairs closet and prayed. Right now, the closet is the only thing left standing in her house.
'It's a miracle,' she said. 'That's what it is.'
