EVANSVILLE — You can see it in the eyes of the maintenance guy who was working at Eastbrook Mobile Home Park when an F3 tornado roared through it, taking 20 lives.
Thursday, Nov. 6, will mark the 20th anniversary of the night death came to Eastbrook from out of the sky. At the mention of it, the man winces slightly. Yes, he still works here, he says politely. No, he doesn’t want to talk about it.
You can hear it in the insistence of the property manager who at first wanted to deny the park’s cooperation with a series of stories by the Courier & Press.
“It’s negative publicity for our park,” she declares in her office.
Besides, the woman says, it’s Waterford Pointe Community now. A different company owns it.
“(The tornado) really has nothing to do with us,” she says.
You can feel it, too, in the tiny bit of serenity offered by 11-6-05 Tornado Memorial Park on the west side of Waterford Pointe grounds. The grassy, fenced-in park with playground, trees and benches includes memorials to the many agencies who helped respond to the disaster and to the residents who lost their lives.
The tornado that devastated Eastbrook Mobile Home Park in the pre-dawn darkness of Nov. 6, 2005 has left 20 years of emotional wreckage in its wake, the impact dulled but not diminished by the years. Memories of the pain, loss and upheaval lie just below the surface.
Current park residents who weren’t there then speak of the tragic event respectfully when asked, regarding it as a curiosity or a cautionary tale. They knew the history of the place, and it didn’t prevent them from moving in. They say the park is a tight-knit community where neighbors look out for each other.
It’s been a long and winding road to get to that point.
The Courier & Press reported a year after the tornado that, while there was evidence of recovery and rebuilding everywhere, some residents were quick to leave the park when storms were forecast and the sky turned dark.
“Man, those cars are just flying out of here,” Marcella Rawlings told the newspaper then.
Brittany Horn told the Courier & Press she too used to hightail it out of the park when storms approached, but she “finally got over it.”
“I realized it impacts my kids the way I react to that,” Horn said.
It’s nothing like that today, Jamie Cahill said on the grounds of Waterford Pointe.
Cahill, who has lived there since 2017, helps run the residents-only Facebook page and maintains the food pantry located in the rental office. Her 14-year-old son has his own lawncare business serving residents.
Cahill is enmeshed in the fabric of the place.
People at Waterford Pointe don’t have any more fear of ominous weather than anyone else, said Cahill, whose brother is a storm chaser. But they are cautious.
“We are able to see what can possibly happen because it’s happened,” she said. “I mean, you can have a trailer anywhere. Not just out here, that could happen.”
The park has capacity for some 320 homes, and Cahill said it is perpetually full. She can count vacancies on one hand at any given time.
“It’s a pretty popular place to live,” she said.
Having reconsidered her earlier stance against cooperating with the Courier & Press, the property manager promised to reach out to current residents who were living at Eastbrook when the tornado scattered it into the wind. Maybe some of them will call you, she said. They didn’t.
But Cahill glanced off into the distance from her property. That’s where Shana lives, she said, pointing to one trailer. Shana was here then. She remembers.
‘Get out now!’
The tornado hit Eastbrook, a large mobile home park surrounded by cornfields southeast of Evansville, shortly before 2 a.m. It had gained strength since striking Ellis Park and was now an F3 with winds up to 180 mph.
Some people got warnings through weather radios, phone calls from loved ones or by seeing the terrifying flashing red radar images on TV for themselves. They had seconds to respond, minutes if they were lucky.
Shana Devinney, a Bristol Myers relief operator who was living alone in a trailer off Tee Pee Drive, was one of the lucky ones.
A friend and her young niece were visiting and the group was watching a movie in the early morning hours with candles lit. Devinney remembers that her mother, who also lived at Eastbrook, called her a few times, but she didn’t pick up. Her mother often called, but on this night her calls were especially persistent.
“We lived in the same trailer park!” Devinney told the Courier & Press. “I ignored it. I was like, ‘My gosh, I’ve talked to you how many times today?!’”
Devinney stepped outside to smoke a cigarette and her phone rang again. Her mother again. It was nearly 2 a.m. This time, she picked up. The voice on the other end of the line was frantic.
“She said, ‘Shana, you’ve got to get out of that trailer and you’ve got to get out now!'” Devinney recalled. “I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ She said, ‘Shana, I’ve got the news on, and you need to get out now! She said, ‘Turn your TV on channel 25.'”
Devinney’s mother was watching Wayne Hart, chief meteorologist at WEHT-ABC25 in Evansville. Devinney tuned in to see what all the fuss was about. What she saw made her blood run cold.
“I saw the red and I — apparently (the tornado) hit over Ellis Park and it was like getting real close real fast,” she said.
Wearing shorts in November, Devinney left her phone, her two precious cats and all her possessions behind in a mad rush. Her friend wrapped her niece in a blanket and the three of them pealed out of the driveway in Devinney’s midsize SUV. At her mother’s trailer they piled her, Devinney’s stepfather and the couple’s dog in with them and roared away.
“I turned left on Pollack (Avenue) and as soon as I came out from under the (what is now Interstate 69) overpass, there was stuff in the air flying and I didn’t know what to do,” Devinney said. “So I just turned around like I was coming back home and stopped underneath the overpass.
“We barely made it out.”
Devinney and her little troop couldn’t see anything in the pitch-black darkness. She doesn’t remember hearing anything either, but she can only surmise the tornado was at that moment ripping through Eastbrook or departing.
Devinney also doesn’t remember whether she saw first responders or sensed a cessation of the carnage, but after a short stay under the underpass — she doesn’t know how long — she moved.
“We pulled up to Lynn Road, and then we stopped on Lynn Road at the back end of it, and I mean — ambulance, firetrucks, helicopters,” she said. “I mean, you couldn’t get out, Let’s just say that. If you were in (the park) or on Lynn Road, you could not get out.”
There was no returning to Eastbrook in a car in those first few moments. But Devinney and her mother could see the back end of the older woman‘s trailer, which faced Lynn Road. The damage wasn’t so bad. Maybe this wasn’t going to be a total catastrophe.
“I could tell her trailer was just kind of crooked,” Devinney said. “It was basically just kind of knocked to the side a little bit.”
Devinney’s thoughts shifted to her two beloved cats and her possessions, some of which were precious to her. She had to see about her own trailer.
“Even though they had told us to stay put because they were trying to account for everyone,” she said.
What she would find would shock her to the core.
Journey into the devastation
In the pitch black — the tornado had destroyed street lights — Devinney and her friend set out on foot to find her lot.
Inside the mobile home park, metal siding was wrapped around tree branches. Pieces of broken glass and splintered wood lay everywhere. Broken gas lines hissed and downed utility wires flickered. Survivors wandered around with flashlights, calling for friends and loved ones.
“There were people stopping on 69, I guess families of people who lived out here, and were jumping over the rail and running down the hill,” Devinney recalled. “People were in panic mode. It was like being in a movie.”
By now disabused of the notion that this had been nothing but a bad storm, Devinney and her friend kept moving.
The doublewide that had been on the back end of her trailer was still there. Devinney said. She walked past that, and there it was. Her lot, where she had lived in a brand new trailer for less than a year with her two cats and a lifetime’s worth of possessions.
“There was nothing,” she recalled. “Nothing. Not a piece of anything in the lot. It looked like there had never been anything there. It was all gone.”
Devinney’s friend’s car was still there. The driveway was still there. And more debris from other homes. There was plenty of that.
Devinney remembers falling to her knees in grief about her two cats.
“I just said my babies are in there,” she said. “It kind of broke my heart.”
The next few hours before dawn are a haze for Devinney, who remembers that she and her friend weren’t able to leave while first responders and aid workers hunted for survivors in the rubble.
“It was so dark out here and with the gas lines whistling and gas going into the air and everything, they were trying to keep people where they were,” she recalls. “We didn’t even get to leave until 7 o’clock in the morning. It seemed like an eternity.”
Aftermath
In the massive relief and recovery aid campaign that unfolded in the days and weeks to follow, Devinney and other survivors finally started to get a trickle of good news.
On Nov. 10, four days after the tornado, Eastbrook residents were taken by bus back to the park and given two hours to recover whatever they could of their lost property.
“That was hard, coming and seeing it in the daylight,” she said.
But Devinney made astonishing discoveries.
Her mother’s mother, a world traveler, had given Devinney a box of fragile Belleek china. She found it intact, each piece unbroken and still wrapped individually in newspaper. Not bubble wrap. Newspaper.
“This china was so thin,” she said. “I never put it out because I didn’t have anything to put it out in, in my new mobile home.”
Devinney also found her grandmother’s wedding ring and her laminated obituary strewn in the dirt. She found a photo of her grandmother in Japan — it’s hanging on her wall now — and a wide collection of currency the older woman had brought home from other nations.
It was all located within roughly a one-block radius of where Devinney’s trailer had been. She also found a few daggers she’d hung on her wall. A neighbor found her loveseat on a nearby street.
One discovery brought Devinney to tears.
A massive pet recovery effort mounted by area animal welfare organizations had turned up snakes, turtles, gerbils, goldfish, rabbits, birds and of course, dogs and cats — including one of Devinney’s cats, Callie.
Their emotional reunion at the Vanderburgh Humane Society is one of Devinney’s favorite memories.
Callie would have eight more years with Devinney, who eventually gave her to an elderly neighbor who had formed a close relationship with the animal. Devinney moved to Chattanooga to take a job as a phelebotomist, eventually drifting back to Eastbrook, now Waterford Pointe.
She is no longer in touch with anyone she knew at Eastbrook Mobile Home Park on November 6, 2005. Her mother passed in 2015.
Devinney never had any nightmares about that night but, like other survivors, she had been reluctant to discuss her experiences with the Courier & Press, debating the matter for weeks. She is sensitive to the feelings of people who lost loved ones at Eastbrook.
In the final of a long round of interviews, Devinney began to cry. She hadn’t done that since the tornado happened 20 years ago, she explained.
“I wanted people to understand that night from someone who didn’t lose anyone but still lost everything,” she said.
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: 20 years later, memories and pain from tornado still echo in Evansville mobile home park
Reporting by Thomas B. Langhorne, Evansville Courier & Press / Evansville Courier & Press
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