Parkersburg a shining example of post-disaster recovery
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Parkersburg a shining example of post-disaster recovery
By Orlan Love
The Gazette
Houses at various stages of construction are seen in what was the path of last year's tornado, in Parkersburg on Tuesday, May 12, 2009. Nearly 300 homes were destroyed, and about 100 of those have not yet been rebuilt / Photo by Liz Martin, The Gazette.
Though trees remain scarce and Tyvek house wrap is still the dominant exterior design motif, officials here rate the town’s recovery from a nuclear-bomb-like EF5 tornado at about 75 percent complete.
In the year since the May 25 tornado destroyed nearly 300 homes and killed six people in Parkersburg and two in nearby New Hartford, the town is “about 80 percent back to normal, with the rest to be made up this summer,” Mayor Bob Haylock said.
City Clerk Gary Hinders said the rebuilding of houses is between 75 percent and 80 percent complete, with city infrastructure lagging in the 50 percent to 60 percent range.
“It will take a couple of years to fix the destruction that occurred in 20 to 30 seconds,” he said.
Police Chief Chris Luhring, a leader in the effort to replace the town’s ruined playgrounds, rates the physical recovery at 75 percent, but the psychological recovery — repairs to what Luhring calls “damage to the heart” — has barely begun, he said.
“People see our recovery and they say, ‘You’re all right,’ but hearts are hurting. It takes time. There is post-traumatic stress, and that’s totally all right when you go through something like an EF5 tornado, which struck like an atom bomb,” Luhring said.
The Rev. Betsy Piette, pastor at Parkersburg United Methodist Church, said she and other local clergy have been discussing ways to help their congregations counter the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.
When the dollar damage has all been totaled up, it won’t include residents’ emotional suffering, she said, adding, “You can’t put a value on the trauma people experienced.”
Repairing emotional damage has been largely deferred while residents rebuild their homes, Piette said.
Hinders said he still marvels at the fortitude and ambition of Parkersburg residents who dusted themselves off and immediately set about rebuilding.
“Their attitude has been ‘Lead, follow or get out of the way.’ They were digging basements before their debris was hauled away,” he said.
The No. 1 thing he’s learned during the past year, Hinders said, is “do not discourage people when they want to rebuild.”
Hinders said he, like most Parkersburg employees, has worked double shifts during the past year to ensure the city does not stand in the way of progress. For example, in a city that typically issued one or two building permits a month, Parkersburg has issued 234 since the tornado and 150 so far in 2009, he said.
Parkersburg, which had 1,889 residents as of the 2000 census, had been expecting to climb above 2,000 in the upcoming national count. “We’re hoping now to hold our own at 1,889. If I had to guess, I’d say we’ve lost between 100 and 150 people,” Hinders said.
While most of them will be missed, the following six, killed by the tornado, will continue to be grieved: Bertha Eckhoff, 85; Charles Horan, 74; Richard and Ethel Mulder, both 80; Shirley Luhring, 71; and Ray Meyocks, 74.
Hinders said the town immediately lost $43 million in assessed property value, which was 49 percent of the community’s tax base. Add to that about $13 million to rebuild damaged or destroyed municipal infrastructure and $18 million to replace the school, and the total damage approaches $75 million, he said.
Though most of the loss was indemnified by private insurance or by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that does not mean residents came out ahead, Hinders said.
“Most of the new homes cost more than the ones they replaced, and many people who did not have mortgages before the tornado have them now,” he said.
Hinders said the city still has about 100 fewer houses than it had before the tornado. “I expect we will be 60 or 70 houses short when the rebuilding is complete,” he said.
Most of the shortfall is attributable to older residents moving to retirement communities and residents rebuilding on lots expanded by the purchase of neighboring property.
Though there will be fewer houses, the new ones are more expensive, and the city hopes to get back to 100 percent of its pre-storm assessed property value, Hinders said.
The city also hopes to get back to 100 percent of its shade trees, but that will take much longer. By this fall, when the last of five tree-planting events is finished, the town will have as many trees as it did before the tornado, but they will be a lot smaller, Hinders said.
On the commercial side, Parkersburg economic development director Virgil Goodrich said 13 of the 15 businesses destroyed by the tornado have reopened or soon will.
“We lost two businesses, both restaurants, but we have three new ones coming in,” he said.
Parkersburg sales-tax receipts, a good indicator of economic activity, increased markedly in the two post-tornado quarters for which state figures are available.
In the last quarter of 2008, sales-tax proceeds were $3.4 million — up more than 27 percent from the comparable year-earlier quarter. In the third quarter of 2008, receipts were almost 18 percent higher than in the comparable year-earlier period.
Those gains reflect the rebuilding effort and the replacement of items lost in the tornado, though most such expenditures were made outside of Parkersburg.
A comparison of the last two quarters in 2007 and 2008 shows that construction-related sales tax surged from $441,000 to more than $1 million and that sales tax for businesses selling building materials and home furnishings went from about $1.5 million to nearly $2.5 million.
Residents are most excited, Goodrich said, about the grand opening this weekend of Brothers Market, the town’s only grocery store. The new 13,800-square-foot market will be 40 percent larger than the store destroyed by the tornado, said store manager Dusty Hanson.
“It’s going to be huge. The town has been waiting for this. It’s one of the big missing pieces, like the school,” Hanson said.
Most of the new $18 million school will be ready when classes resume this fall, said Aplington-Parkersburg Superintendent Jon Thompson. “We set an aggressive goal to be back in one year, and we’re going to make it,” he said.
With eight classrooms in portable buildings and the entire high school jammed into what had been the elementary school in Aplington, students had to adapt quickly to the new reality.
“Hard as that sounds, it has been a fantastic school year,” Thompson said. “It would have been easy for our seniors to be bummed out by the changes, but they came over (to Aplington) and made the absolute best out of it and set the tone for a tremendous school year.”
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