EVAVNSVILLE — Joyce Berry could have lost the chance to meet her granddaughter.
Berry’s son became a father to a little girl Friday, Nov. 4, 2005. In the early morning darkness of Nov. 6, 2005, a tornado ripped through the Eastbrook Trailer Park where Berry was living.
She woke up a few minutes before it hit. The wind was loud, and the trailer had started to shake. Then it went off the foundation.
Berry would then wake up with her legs and arms splayed out after she’d been sat down on the ground somewhere in the park. She had dirt in her mouth, potentially insulation too, she said. She just laid there at first. Looking back, she doesn’t know if she was assessing the situation or simply couldn’t do much else with the wind knocked out of her.
“I didn’t know where I was,” she said, recounting the story to the Courier & Press ahead of the storm’s 20th anniversary. “I was kind of face down.”
Berry thought she could hear sirens, but they sounded really far away. When she started to yell for help, it sounded like a whisper.
Finally, she heard someone call back that they would find her. A boy and his grandpa soon did, and they then guided the firefighters to her.
The first responders dug Berry out of the debris before putting her on a door being used as a makeshift stretcher and sliding her into the bed of a pickup truck. They then drove her to the ambulances couldn’t get down to the victims at that time.
After she was loaded into an ambulance, she was taken to Deaconess Midtown. She had two broken vertebrae in her neck.
After getting out of the hospital, she would end up at HealthSouth Deaconess for rehab. Then she’d stay with friends for a bit, before renting a house on Evansville’s southeast side.
Then in 2007, Berry found a new forever home in New Haven, a Habitat for Humanity subdivision which would end up with 55 homes, about 40 of which were lived in by families impacted by the tornado.
Berry was one of the first six households to move in. The last home in the subdivision was dedicated in December 2009.
The 78-year-old retiree lives on her own, like she did at Eastbrook. She had moved into the mobile home park in 2003, a couple years after her husband, Maurice, died.
When she first heard about the Habitat build, Berry said she didn’t anticipate it being a community of so many people who went through the same experience.
She didn’t know that many people when living at Eastbrook, but that changed once working on site at New Haven. With Habitat builds, homeowners must put in “sweat equity.” This means working on their own properties, or helping with a neighbor’s, and that introduced the former Eastbrook residents to one another pretty quickly.
Berry said Habitat workers were also great at making introductions. As the work continued, the neighbors would try to go to each other’s house dedication ceremonies, even after they themselves were moved in.
Moving in meant scoping out yard sales and thrift shops for items new to Berry. She’d lost many things in the tornado, including a watch her father gave her mother the day Berry was born.
Her purse was found, with all the items still inside. A memory book with her son Donald’s school pictures was also recovered, the cover a bit banged up but nothing missing.
But one incredible find was an item that made its way back to her from Jasper, Indiana, about an hour away from Evansville. A photo of Berry and Donald was found there and sent down to an Evansville news station.
People recognized Berry, and she was soon reunited with the photo – framed as a gift from some friends.
“You can’t tell there was anything on it,” Berry said. “That it went through anything.
The picture now hangs in the hallway of her home in the New Haven subdivision.
Feeling more secure in a new home
When Sue Burns woke up in the wee hours of Nov. 6, 2005, she thought kids were outside tossing a basketball against her trailer.
“I hollered out there, ‘keep it down, I gotta work in the morning,'” Burns said.
But it didn’t quiet down. So, Burns got out of bed to tell them to knock it off. When she got up, she thought it was an earthquake. Now she was heading to tell the kids not just to stop throwing the ball, but to head home.
She only made it to her kitchen before she saw the floor covered in mud. She’d just mopped it the night before, but the window had been left open just enough.
Burns was going to shut the window when the kitchen table shifted and threw her into the stove. She ended up crawling over to close the window.
Determined to tell the kids they needed to head home, Burns went to the front door. She couldn’t get it open.
She was home alone that night and was going to go back and call to let her family know not to come home real soon until whatever was going on passed. Back in the kitchen, Burns saw a fender go by the window, then a tire, then a wheelbarrow pass by and come back around.
There was debris everywhere.
“I thought, ‘oh my word, this isn’t an earthquake. It’s a tornado,'” Burns said. “…Finally, when it was over, you could hear a pin drop. Then all hell broke loose.”
From about 3:30 to 8:30 a.m., all Burns and other neighbors did was walk up and down the lots at Eastbrook looking for people to make sure they were alright. Some weren’t.
Moving back after the storm was never an option for Burns. She knows people who did, but if she went to see them and a storm was coming, she headed home fast.
‘“I’m about over all that know,” she said. “There for a long time, it was scary.”
Burns, now 77, said she feels a lot safer in the New Haven home. One of the features of the house is a reinforced bathroom, a room high on the list of safe spaces during bad weather.
But Burns said she’s now stopped even going in there for bad weather. Her view on a major storm like that, it doesn’t make a difference where she’s at, as long as she covers her face and hangs on.
“When it’s your turn to go, you’re gone,” Burns said. “There ain’t nothing you can do about it. I guess that’s the old age talking.”
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Evansville residents look back on 2005 tornado which led them to New Haven neighborhood
Reporting by Sarah Loesch, Evansville Courier & Press / Evansville Courier & Press
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