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| Joe Imel/Daily News Nursing broken windows, splintered shutters and scarred siding, an apartment complex sits in relative calm hours after a hailstorm hammered the area in 1998. Some $500 million in damage was done across southcentral Kentucky. Click here for video, photos and stories from the storm. |
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On April 16, 1998, a storm swept through southcentral Kentucky. But it wasn’t any storm - it would be remembered as THE storm, leaving a path of devastation in Warren County that took years from which to recover.
Nearly softball-sized hail left craters in fields, smashed windshields of thousands of cars, broke windows in homes and left roofs and home siding looking like shrapnel. The storm also spawned tornadoes that damaged homes, churches and businesses and left one person dead in Barren County.
And then there was the flooding.
Click here for video, photos and stories from the storm.
Copious amounts of rain that fell with the storm, which began that day about 3:30 p.m., left many neighborhood streets and arteries flooded and residents scrambling to cover blown-out windows and shredded roofs.
Much of the damage centered around Scottsville and Cemetery roads and property nearby.
Bowling Green High School, at 1801 Rockingham Lane, was shut down for the remainder of the year because of the extent of its damage. The school was on spring break when the storm hit.
“I was in Indiana - I had just gone there that day ...” Superintendent Joe Tinius said. “I got a call about the bad storms, and I contemplated trying to drive back that afternoon. If I had driven back that afternoon ... if I had left then, I would have hit Elizabethtown about the time the tornado went through there.
“As it was, I got back the next morning about 7:30 a.m. We live in the back part of Briarwood, and my wife had stayed here so I had talked to her (about the storm), but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.”
Tinius said he made some quick repairs to his own home, which sustained about $40,000 in damage. Hail had smashed through bedroom windows, went through the bedroom and down a hallway because of the velocity with which it hit, Tinius said.
Then he went to the high school to survey the damage. At the time, Tinius was director of transportation and facilities.
“I absolutely wasn’t prepared for what I saw when I got there,” he said. “After a quick walkthrough, I next had to assess what damage there was to the buses ... and see if there would be enough to operate school on Monday.”
By quickly replacing mirrors and headlights, there were enough buses to roll on Monday.
At a special school board meeting that Friday, the day after the storm, members, after consulting with the state, halted the planning process on a new junior high school and instead directed the architect to begin planning the rebuilding of the high school, with the help of construction manager Alliance Corp.
That Saturday, insurance adjusters were at the school.
“Our first adjuster came in from South Carolina,” Tinius said. “He said that short of a hurricane or fire, it was the worst water damage he had seen in a building.”
The hail had punched 2-inch to 8-inch holes all over the flat roof. The only portions that were spared were over the arena and a small gymnasium that had a newer roofing system. With no power to the building, it was as dark and damp as a cave, with up to 6 inches of water standing in places, Tinius said.
“We made the decision to get a temporary roof on as quickly as possible,” he said.
Unfortunately, it rained another 3 inches or so that Saturday before a temporary roof was installed, and more water poured in.
Ceilings that hadn’t collapsed already did after the extra rains; nearly the whole building had to be gutted and furniture and textbooks replaced.
“There was no way we were going to be able to get back in there before the end of the school,” he said.
Another special board meeting come on Sunday, when the decision was made to pull a double shift in what was then the junior high school on Center Street. Tinius said because both high school and junior high days had been longer than the minimum required, it was determined they could shorten the school days and still finish as planned on May 22.
The district was granted five calamity days for high school students and spent the next week making arrangements at the junior high school for classes to begin.
On April 21, officials took small groups of teachers into their classrooms and they were given 25 to 30 minutes to retrieve the essentials they needed to instruct class.
“I think that might have been the toughest day, seeing some teachers who had a lifetime of personal materials ... destroyed by water,” Tinius said.
On April 27, the new schedule began with junior high school students going to class from 7:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m., having a short lunch break before they went home for the day. High school students went to class from 1 p.m. to 5:45 p.m., and were treated to a snack since they stayed so late in the day.
“We basically had 45 minutes to get the building cleared out and the junior high students bused home and the high school students bused in,” he said.
So for the last five weeks of class, the junior high school did double duty.
“It worked because everyone made it work ... teachers, parents and students,” he said.
The junior high wasn’t the only building that sustained damage - roofs had to be replaced on T.C. Cherry, McNeill and 11th Street Alternative schools. Between the high school, three other schools, buses, work on the grounds, including lighting and bleachers at the high school, the district sustained $6.8 million in damage. The district’s insurance carrier paid all but $75,821 that was reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The carrier would have paid all of the claim if FEMA hadn’t kicked in any funds, Tinius said.
“Our policy was replacement value,” he said.
Reconstruction of the new school began shortly before Memorial Day and was ready for classes on Aug. 2. The entire project was finished by fall break.
Tinius said he had a hard time living down the fact that he could oversee the school project finished in 106 days - yet it took until January to get all the repair work done at his home.
It took Bethany Baptist Church in Alvaton about a year to rebuild when the top floor and roof of its sanctuary was ripped off, according to Pastor Carroll Mosley.
Mosley said he was just looking at a photo album Wednesday that tells the story of the storm and the church’s rebuilding.
“We have come so far in putting our church back together as far as the building itself. Of course, the church is the people,” he said. “But in looking, I see just how much better the building is today than it was before the tornado.”
The foundation of that building was first constructed in 1848 or so, he said. It’s now a one-story building. The center support poles have been removed and the sanctuary is graced with a soaring cathedral ceiling.
Mosley said he wasn’t at the church when the storm hit, but he got a call from Judy Powell, who was in the parking lot at the time.
“She was parked right next to the church,” he said. “She called me and said ‘Brother Mosley, you won’t believe what just happened,’ and she told me the storm took the top off the church and it was sitting in the cemetery and scattered across the field.”
Powell, who was in her van at the time, was unscathed.
“I was working at Stoody’s at the time and the sirens went off, and they said go find a place of shelter,” Powell said. “It was quitting time, and I had already clocked out. I looked out and didn’t see anything happening, so I left. I heard on the radio about the storm and thought, ‘Whoops, maybe I shouldn’t have left.’ ”
Powell said she traveled Natcher Parkway to Scottsville Road and then headed toward Alvaton, all the while listening to the radio that was alerting her where the hail was and how large it was.
“I got behind this van that was driving really slow and the people pointing and looking out the window,” she said. “The wind was swirling around in a circle and I was thinking I really want to turn, so I wish they would move faster. ... When I got to Wilson Road and turned across Old Scottsville Road, it started hailing, and I thought about where I could park and get out of this.”
Powell said she turned left and zipped in behind Bethany Baptist as close to the building as she could get.
“That’s where the story really begins,” she said. “I’m a person who really enjoys watching storms. It was all coming straight in from Scottsville Road; I was watching the trees weigh over in front of me and all of a sudden something dark comes over me and lands all around me and it’s the roof of the main part of the church. Just a few shingles brushed down the back of the van and put a little scuff mark on it.”
At the time, Powell wasn’t a member of the church, but knew where they kept the key, so she went inside, grabbed a phone book and started calling for help.
Jim Bates and his wife, Ida, live within 150 yards of the Alvaton Church, but they weren’t home at the time.
“We were at Red Lobster having an afternoon meal and they put us in the restroom,” Ida Bates said. “We watched this huge monstrous hail beat up our car.”
She said there was no phone service and no way to call a wrecker.
“We found a pillow and put that in the side window, and I looked through a small sliver of glass in the front windshield and we drove that car home,” she said. “When we got to the church, I said, ‘Oh Jim, look.’ It had just taken the top off and dumped it in the street.”
But their nearby home, the picnic shelter, church’s fellowship hall and Sunday school rooms weren’t damaged. Neither were the church’s stained glass windows that were only recently replaced, Mosley said.
“The pictures are so vivid,” he said. “Oh, the power of the wind and the Lord.”
Mosley said that church members, along with the entire community, pitched in that night to remove what could be salvaged.
“But there was so much hard, beating rain that a lot of things were too damaged and just had to be discarded,” he said.
Despite taking a year to rebuild, the church never missed a service.
“The Lord just provides,” Mosley said. “We had just finished a fellowship hall in February, so we just moved everything right over there.”
Mosley said the church had replacement insurance and was able to get a full settlement to rebuild for a little less than $200,000.
County schools also sustained some damage, but nothing to the extent of city schools, according to Charles Rector, director of maintenance.
“We had to replace five roofs and got some insurance compensation for the metal roofs that we had but didn’t have to replace,” Rector said.
As were the city schools, county schools were on spring break.
“I got caught over on the old Cumberland Trace Road with power lines across my truck, so it had me captured for a while,” Rector said. “There was a small tornado that came over. It didn’t exactly touch down, but it knocked about five electrical poles down, causing the lines to fall across me. I was lucky that I got caught in between two poles and when the poles snapped, it slapped two lines together and knocked out the transformers. So there wasn’t any electricity when it hit my truck.”
Once Rector was freed, he and others surveyed school damage, temporarily boarding up broken school windows as best they could.
“We really we were pretty fortunate because our buildings were brick, where a lot of homes were vinyl siding that got destroyed,” he said.
Rector said there also were parts of rooftop air-conditioning units that had to be replaced.
“I’m sure there were a lot of other things, but I’ve slept since then,” he said.
Ramel Tunks, who is assistant to the superintendent, said central office staff were at work that day in the building that used to be on Kenton Street.
“We had to go to basement and basement started flooding,” Tunks said.
Rector said several files were damaged as a result of the flood.
Tunks lives in Allen County and her home wasn’t damaged.
“But I remember driving down Scottsville Road the next morning and thinking, ‘Oh my gosh,’ ” she said. “The car lots were just devastated.”
Warren County Judge-Executive Mike Buchanon declared the county a disaster.
“It ... hit our neighborhood hard, even blowing out the windows of Bill and Lisa Leachman’s house,” Buchanon said of his neighbors’ home. “The baseball-size hail riddled the entire rear section of my house. It stripped the foliage off of all of our trees, and completely stopped the drains from the basement, causing my basement to flood.
“I believe everyone in our neighborhood (Bent Tree) had to replace the roofing of the homes at the very least,” Buchanon said via e-mail. “The hail storm traveled a 10- to 12-mile path through the county, going directly through the city of Bowling Green. It damaged virtually every car in the city that wasn’t parked in a garage, or protected in some way. Since it happened during normal work hours, very few cars and trucks in the city were spared.”
Buchanon recalled that nearly $1 million in damage was done at the Bowling Green-Warren County Regional Airport. Warren County Emergency Management Services said 11 planes were severely damaged and one was destroyed by hail.
“April 16th of 1998 was a day that most people who lived in Warren County at the time will remember forever,” Buchanon said.
Barney Jones, Barren County’s sheriff at the time, said the tornado that touched down in his county required the help of all available emergency services personnel.
“It was a very disastrous situation,” Jones said. “Of course, we have had one since then further up in the county.”
Jones said most of the tornado’s path was on Hollow Road, where Powell Meek was killed.
“I remember we were looking for him and couldn’t find him because a building had collapsed on top of him,” Jones said.
Destruction also hit homes along Ky. 90.
In all, 19 homes were destroyed and numerous others were damaged. Trees were twisted and tops snapped out of them “and the debris was scattered for miles,” Jones said.
“All the emergency personnel were there we could get and as I remember it, it was for three, four or five days and nights,” he said. “We blocked the road - had the National Guard out there detouring traffic.
“If no one has ever seen something like that, it’s hard to believe that much force can happen, but it did and it can.”
Barren County’s then-Judge-Executive David Dickerson was living on Hollow Road, where most of the devastation occurred.
“I was looking out the front door and watched the sky fall out,” Dickerson said.
He rode out the storm in his basement with his children and when he emerged, he couldn’t believe what he saw.
“The cleanup was a four- or five-day process,” Dickerson said. “It was a really horrible event.”
In addition to Meek’s death during the storm, his nephew, Oscar, died a few days later, he said.
“I’m pretty sure it was from overexertion during the storm cleanup of his property,” Dickerson said.
“One thing you might find interesting in all of this,” he said. “I had a lady from Green County call me several days later and she said she’d found a gentleman’s canceled checks.”
She was afraid to call him, fearing he had died, since the checks had traveled some 20 miles to Green County.
“His house was one of those damaged but I called him up and asked him what he wanted to do with them,” Dickerson said. “He said, ‘just shred them.’ I thought that was pretty interesting for them to be carried that long a way.”
More than 300 volunteers plus the National Guard helped out during the cleanup, he said.
“It was an entire community effort and everybody responded as you would expect people in southcentral Kentucky to,” Dickerson said.
