Although the supercells that moved through western Kentucky last Thursday, March 14 did not cause much noticeable damage to the Owensboro-Daviess County area, one local family was keeping a particularly close eye on that storm.
“I wasn’t home, but I was watching it,” said Jarrod Carter, whose family had to relocate temporarily after an EF1 tornado caused extensive damage to their Stanley home in September. “Anything that comes out of the Dixon, Kentucky area is headed this way. They showed the cone and the last name was Burke City, that’s the same path as the one that hit our house.”
Jarrod said he was at work Thursday, and his wife Carrie, a teacher at College View Middle School, and all three children were at school. He said he received multiple text messages during a short period of time asking if he was OK, most of them being from his 16-year-old daughter Addison.
When the tornado struck their home on September 8, Addison and her younger brother Carson were home alone. Having advanced warning, and after contacting her parents, Addison hid with Carson in their parent’s master bedroom closet — just 10 to 15 feet away from where the tornado made impact.
“I’m so glad that we trained our kids what to do when a warning is announced, especially since we were not home with them this time,” Carrie said. “They knew exactly what to do.”
It has been over six months since that frightful day and, although the family is safely back home and most of the repairs have been completed, Jarrod said they still track storms in the area and now have a term for things that have happened since the event.
“We now speak in things in term of ‘pre-tornado’ and ‘post-tornado,’” Jarrod said. “Any sounds we hear in the bathroom (where the majority of the interior damage took place) we consider post-tornado sounds.”
Although the Carters consider themselves blessed to have only lost material possessions to tornado damage, this was not their first encounter with damage to the property. In October 2007, ironically just two days after the EF-3 tornado wound its way through Owensboro, the Carters lost their previous home to an electrical fire.
“Thankfully no one was home,” Jarrod said. “That one was different as all we had left was the clothes on our back.”
The home they lost in 2007 was Carrie’s grandparents’ farmhouse. The entire home was replaced in 2008, making it just under 10 years before the property sustained damage again.
This time, the Carters spent three months, including Christmas, in Carrie’s parents’ guest quarters while repairs were made. On New Year’s Eve, they moved back into their home and are now getting close to having all of the repairs completed. The entire master bedroom wall had to be replaced, the jacuzzi tub was torn out and the standup shower re-done, while most of the house had to be repainted due to the continuity of the walls.
“We had the inspection a week ago,” Jarrod said, adding that the Hardie board still needed to be finished and the roof had yet to be replaced.
While everyone is happy to be back home, it is apparent that the Carters value family above all else.
“It’s good to be back at home,” Carrie said. “Post-tornado, it’s a little more stressful. But, it’s kind of like, ‘we’ve been there, done that’. You just have to roll with the punches. We’ve realized that they’re just material things and they can be replaced.”
