Roads to recovery

The gawkers don't come around anymore.

The volunteers who came in droves to help strangers remove debris and salvage the salvageable are seldom seen. Traffic comes and goes as it pleases.

For those Jackson residents who were not directly hit by the May 6 tornado, it may appear that business is getting back to normal.

For the unfortunate ones, life one month later is still anything but.

Many are still living with relatives. Some are living with tarps over their windows or their rooftops. Some are living in houses that are rain-damaged and almost certainly mold-infested.

Many spend almost all of their free time cutting up trees and cleaning up debris, hoping to get their junk to the curb by the city's June 13 deadline. Residents of an entire neighborhood go home to find that splintered trees or sawed-off stumps are all that remain on their once richly shaded lots, lots that meant almost as much to the homeowners as the houses themselves.

Some businesses, like the K-9 Training Center, have already relocated and have started business again. Others, like Meyer's Bakery, still haven't found the right place to relocate.

Some are rebuilding, some are still cleaning up, some are still deciding what to do next.

In the past month, the city's public works employees have spent 1,800 hours, including 450 hours of overtime, cleaning up the city. Workers have hauled off 350 tons of debris to the transfer station and 750 tons of clean brush to be chipped or burned. Jackson's street superintendent Steve Hendrix said he expects 350 more tons of brush to be hauled off in the next few weeks as the city wraps up its cleanup campaign.

Perhaps the quickest recovery is occurring at the city's police and fire station. The building's roof, including the frame, was torn off the first Tuesday night in May.

Penzel Construction, which had 11 of its own 12 buildings damaged, is doing the repairs on the police station and the progress is "unprecedented," according to Phil Penzel, president of the construction company and also a city alderman.

The overhead doors were installed Thursday and by late next week, the fire department will be able to protect its trucks inside the garage.

The entire interior has been stripped to the concrete walls and floors. The once-soaked insulation is completely gone.

Some roofing materials arrived for the station in Jackson this week.

"Normally, it takes eight weeks for the materials to get shipped," Penzel said. "Four weeks is unprecedented, really."

Penzel said the windows won't arrive for another three weeks, but the departments could move in as early as another month. There will be a lot of work to do beyond that, he said, like getting the computer and communication systems going.

The tornado that blew apart the police and fire station also damaged 312 other structures, according to numbers from the American Red Cross. Twenty-two homes were destroyed. Nineteen structures were condemned, including 14 homes, two businesses and a large part of Immaculate Conception Catholic School.

So far, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials say 186 applications have been turned in for federal financial assistance in Cape Girardeau County. FEMA did not have the numbers on how many of those 186 have received checks, although statewide, 1,655 checks have been cut for a total of $5.98 million.

John Thompson's home was one of the 22 buildings considered destroyed. He has taken an optimistic approach to the disaster.

He came to the realization a couple of days after the tornado that things could have been much worse, and he sees it as a blessing that his home was totaled instead of heavily damaged.

"I look at other poor souls who still have tarps on their roofs or are still messing with adjusters and insurance companies," Thompson said. "Even though we lost the house, we're at a good starting point."

Thompson, who is staying with his wife at his in-laws house, said he plans to build almost the exact same house at the same location. Only, this time, it'll be a little bit better.

There was a door that swung the wrong way in his old house. This time, it'll swing the right way. Plus, he'll have the water faucet he always wanted by his driveway.

Living in limbo

Unlike Thompson, many others are still in limbo, waiting to see what settlement they'll get from their insurance. The Immaculate Conception Catholic School is among that group.

Tami Nenninger, the school principal, was hoping to know this week what direction the school might head, but as of Thursday the school was still negotiating.

"It just takes time," she said.

It just takes time to find a good spot to sell pastries too. Connie Meyer, who operated the popular Meyer's Bakery on Hope Street, said she plans to get back into the bakery business, but she doesn't plan to re-open at the same spot.

The building's owners, Ralph and Evelyn Wille, have not decided what they will do with the property, Meyer said.

Meyer said she has a couple of locations in mind, but didn't want to say yet where the new bakery might be.

"We are definitely wanting to get back into it, but we'll streamline it," she said. "We'll just stick with scratch doughnuts and Danish creamhorns and angel food cakes. We won't do decorative cakes or cookies."

While out of work, Meyer said she has been doing a lot of running around lately and filling out a lot of paperwork. She's also thankful for the many people who helped clean up the mess, especially those who took off work.

Other than that, "We're still kind of numb," she said. "We just wonder what direction God wants us to go next."

bmiller@semissourian.com

243-6635