“The smoke carries with it the ashes of the Hutto’s and the Jetton’s homes once stood. People who have lost their homes to the storm now have to watch what’s left go up in ashes.”

CHALYBEATE SPRINGS, AL – Smoke filled the sky. The same sky that recently loosed a monster on Lawrence County, Alabama. The same sky that was filled with the brightest stars I’ve seen in years in the time before the lights came back on.

This sky was dark, billowing it’s foul clouds across the torn landscape, choking people who were working to clear away the remnants of the lives they’d been  living  before the storm blew it over the mountain  to Hillsboro and on up into Tennessee.

A family sat huddled together in the small living room of a nearby house. A young woman clung to her mother.  Her eyes were red-rimmed, whether from tears or from the heat of the fire, I couldn’t tell. She looked up at me helplessly, “I thought I was ready for it to be gone. I thought I was tired of looking at it all piled up out there, but I didn’t expect it to hurt so much,” said Kristie Jetton.

“We lived there for thirty-two years,” said her father, Kenneth Hutto, in a hushed voice.

The Hutto/Jetton family is only one of dozens of families with similar stories. They told of running toward the storm house, of hearing the horrible rushing train-like sounds above. There was debris falling out of the sky, shingles, tree limbs and two-by-six boards came sailing over their heads.  Kristie’s husband, Stacey, saw to it that his family was inside the shelter, then ran next door, desperately banging as hard as he could to make sure their neighbor was aware of the tornado. Dewayne Moland had no idea what was bearing down upon them. The two men barely made it back to the shelter in time.

All this took about four minutes. The group inside the shelter clung to one another. “We were all praying,” said Jetton.

“I know this is hard to believe, I mean, we were six feet underground, but I could actually feel the concrete floor vibrating under my feet,” said Hutto.

There were a dozen people and four dogs in the storm shelter that day. It only lasted for about thirty seconds , but when they emerged all three homes were in shambles, as was most of the landscape as far as they could see in every direction.

“The alarms were still going off,” said Jetton. “A neighbor came running up with a baby in his arms. He said he’d heard him crying and found him in the rubble across the road. “

The Hutto’s took the shivering baby boy, who was wearing only a diaper, wrapping him in a blanket to get him warm. The baby looked to be less than a year old, “He wasn’t old enough to walk, “ said Jetton.

The baby didn’t seem to be injured. As the blanket warmed him, he began to relax in the arms of the strangers who had taken him in. Across the road, people were just emerging from their homes – if they still had one. Most of that area was a trailer court, there was little left standing.

About an hour later, a man came wandering down the road, bleeding from a gash on his head, asking everyone, “Where’s my baby? Where’s my baby?”  The family made sure that the man was the baby’s father, then returned the child to him. “He seemed stunned,” said Stacey Jetton. “That was a miracle.   That baby had been thrown out of one of those trailers’s and there wasn’t a scratch on the little fellow.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this before, and I hope I never see anything like this again,” said Jetton a month later. The smoke is coming from what was left of the home he shared with his wife, Kristie, and their son, Matthew.

Jetton and some of the volunteers who have been working in the area ever since the storms were diligently watching the burn, making sure that it didn’t get out of hand. “These people have really been a blessing to us,” said Jetton of the volunteer crew.

Some of the volunteers are from as far away as Birmingham. They have helped to burn the rubble of what’s left of several homes down this strip of Chalybeate Road. “I’m so amazed at how this community has pulled together, “said volunteer Mark Braselton, of Trinity.

Brent Gailey, whose church, Trinity United Methodist, has helped supply  hot lunches to area residents and other volunteers each day during  the past weeks, has helped bring in donations from sixteen other churches. He has helped man a 24-hour post on the corner of county roads 305 and 214 so that people could have nearby access to supplies like ice, water, food and medical supplies.  Now the group is lending a hand to keep the roaring flames in check.

To date, the Tornado Disaster Team has completely demolished, burned and buried a total of five houses in the Chalybeate area. The magnitude of this disaster would have been compounded if not for people like Gailey, and the hundreds of others who have come from all over the United States to assist Lawrence Countains in this time of need.

People who leave the comfort and security of their own homes and the familiar routine of their daily lives to assist total strangers are without a doubt a perfect example of what Christianity is all about. These generous and caring people have traveled here at their own expense to lend a helping hand to area volunteers and residents. I heard one story from RoyBoy Henderson about a man he plays Farmville with on the computer. The man just loaded up a truck and trailer with supplies and brought them here, no questions asked, quiet thanks accepted. The two had never met in person before the man pulled up with the supplies.

Everywhere I went, the people look so tired, just plain ol’ worn out with worry and exhausted from the gigantic effort.  Stacey Jetton walked in to get a little relief from the heat.

He, too, looked tired and care-worn but joked a little, trying to ease the strain of watching their home disintegrate before their eyes.  People who have lost their homes to the storms shouldn’t have to sit and watch them go up in flames, that’s almost too much to bear. But Jetton summed it up well. “My family is here. We made it through the storm, and the rest can be replaced,” he said. “My father-in-law built that storm house after the ’74 tornados and it’s probably the best money he’s ever spent – it saved our lives.”

Reprinted with permission:
The Moulton Advertiser, and it’s author,  Loretta Gillespie