On a single Kentucky street, the tornado kills seven children

BOWLING GREEN, Kentucky (AP):

The little red wagon was strewn upside down on a heap of rubble – a pile of boards and bricks, a mangled blue bicycle, a baby doll.

Behind it, there was little more than a hole in the ground where a house had stood. Across the street, the tidy homes on this cul-de-sac were reduced to mounds of lumber. Clothes hung from the branches of snapped trees. The walls of one house were gone, and the only thing left standing inside was a white Christmas tree.

When a tornado touched down in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in the middle of the night, its violence was centred on this friendly subdivision, where everyone waved at one another and giggling children spent afternoons tooling around on bicycles on the sidewalks. Fourteen people died in a few blocks, 11 of them on a single street, Moss Creek Avenue. Entire families were lost, among them seven children, two of them infants. Neighbours who survived are so stricken with grief they struggle to speak of it. All around them, amid the ruins, is evidence of the kids they used to watch climb off the school bus.

Melinda Allen-Ray has barely slept since early Saturday, when tornado alerts started screaming and she carried her grandchildren into the bathroom as winds whipped her house apart. After just minutes of destruction, there was silence. She went outside and heard her neighbours’ screams.

“I heard them – it traumatised me. I think about that each night when I go to sleep, when I do sleep,” she said. In her dreams she hears the screaming and wakes up. She wept all weekend.

“I just think about all those babies,” she said.

DIVERSE COMMUNITY

Hers is a diverse community of families from around the world – Bosnia, Myanmar, Nigeria – many of whom fled from violence. For some, this fresh destruction triggers thoughts of the dark days they fled in their homelands, where they hid from bombs and lost whole families.

“We come from war; this reminds us, it touches the memory of that, where we’ve been and how we came here,” said Ganimete Ademi, a 46-year-old grandmother who fled Kosovo in 1999 during the war, in which she lost her uncle and a nephew. Now she looks around her own neighbourhood.

“I turn my memory back to 22 years ago,” she said.

One of the families that lost many members was from Bosnia. Two brothers lived in homes next door to each other with their families, Ademi said. They were happy and gregarious, holding summertime parties in the yard. From the two brothers’ households, one woman died, along with two children and two infants, police said. Their surviving relatives said it’s too difficult to speak of it.

Another family here lost six members: three adults, a 16-year-old girl, a four-year-old boy and another child.

Around the corner, a 77-year-old grandmother was killed. Two others from the neighbourhood died of their injuries at the hospital.

“That’s hard to think about – you go to bed, and your entire family is gone the next day,” said Ronnie Ward, with the Bowling Green Police Department. They usually tell people to get in a bathtub and cover up with a mattress, he said, but that probably would’ve made little difference here: Some homes were destroyed so completely the tornado ripped all the way through the floor, exposing the earth below.

Now, they comb through what remains, turning over every strip of dry wall and each twisted car to make sure there aren’t more victims underneath. It can be horrific work, Ward said, but they try to steady themselves enough because they know it must be done.