Saddened Residents Sift Ruins 28 Dead, Homes Gone In Texas Farm Town
Danny Hammett and his neighbors in this tornado-scarred farming community began a disheartening task Thursday - sifting through the remains of what used to be their homes.
“I’ve got my family. I can rebuild the rest,” said Hammett, a 43-year-old electrician who found his garage sitting in a neighbor’s yard and just the walls of his mobile home still standing. “I worked this long to get what I had. I’ll work to get it back.”
For the first time Thursday, authorities, their rescue efforts done, began allowing surviving residents of the homes destroyed in Tuesday’s tornado to return and assess the terrible damage.
Twenty-eight people and an untold number of animals in the Double Creek subdivision on the southwestern edge of Jarrell were killed when 200 mph winds roared through their neighborhood, stunning a community barely recovered from a devastating but far less deadly 1989 twister.
Amidst the grief and sorrow, however, residents found one consolation Thursday: Officials said their fears that many other residents were unaccounted for, enough to nearly double the death toll, proved unfounded.
“At this point, there are no people who are unaccounted for in the sense that we believe them to still be missing, or who have not called in,” said Laureen Chernow, a spokeswoman with the Texas Department of Public Safety. But there was still much to mourn here. The entire Igo family - father Larry, mother Joan, and teenagers Audrey, Paul and John - was killed. Marie Ruiz and her teenage sons, John and Michael - all dead. In a community of about 500, where everybody knows everybody, this news on top of everything else was almost unbelievable.
“This is a predominantly Czech-German community and you see a lot of stoicism on the outside,” said John Johnson, principal of Jarrell High School, which lost nine of its 150 students who come from Jarrell and the surrounding rural area. “People cry in the privacy of their homes. You won’t see a lot of grief out here, but we are all feeling it.”
The Igos - a popular family known for their musical talents and their church work - apparently rushed home to weather the storm together, a decision that cost them their lives.
When the warning siren at the volunteer fire department sounded Tuesday afternoon, Joan Igo, a teacher, packed her briefcase and fled. Larry Igo, who restored vintage Chevrolets, closed his auto shop. Audrey, 17, who was always requesting that Principal Johnson rearrange her schedule to accommodate her advanced classes, her band-playing and her piano lessons, joined her identical-twin brothers, 15, as they sought shelter together in what would prove to be the deadliest place of all - their new home just east of Double Creek.
No one knows exactly what happened, only that a scoured concrete slab remains where their house once stood. Because of the hard limestone bedrock beneath the central-Texas soil, very few homes here have basements or other underground shelters.
As Boy Scouts unloaded crates of donated supplies Thursday and insurance adjusters took information from victims, Randy Ackley of the American Red Cross put out a plea for “necessities so these folks can get on with their lives - things we take for granted, like a toothbrush and toothpaste, all the way to rent for temporary housing.”
Early Thursday, some residents blasted authorities for the way they have handled the disaster.
“We are lied to. We are treated like criminals,” Stephanie Peterson cried out at a news conference held by the DPS. Her parents lost their home in the tornado and she was frustrated that previous promises by officials that they could return and search for belongings had been delayed. “We lost everything! We didn’t do anything wrong!”
“No, ma’am, you didn’t do anything wrong,” Chernow of the DPS replied. “And we are trying to help you every way we can.”
Peterson’s anger subsided later in the day as the first carloads of residents returned to the ruins. Her uncle, Danny Hammett, already had some idea of what he would find. Allowed to return briefly Wednesday to pick up his eight dogs, who miraculously survived the twister, he already knew his 6-year-old daughter’s beloved horse was gone. He already knew there was nothing left in his trailer home and the walls still standing were covered in mud.
But he could still marvel at the miracle of his father-in-law’s home nearby. Hammett was at work in Austin when the storm hit, but five family members, including his wife, Bonnie, and daughter, Bonita, huddled terrified in the bathroom. All five survived, and when Hammett viewed the devastation, he said he almost could not believe his eyes - the only thing left of that two-story home was the bathroom.