Homeward bound
ASU-Beebe CADD instructor, graduate help tornado victims rebuild
Earlier this year, Rick and Marilyn Kelley’s world was turned upside down for a second time. The couple had survived a tornado that destroyed their mobile home in 1982, and although they lost everything, they rebuilt and lived in their new home for 32 years. Then in April this year, their home was once again in the path of a storm, and the tornado that roared from Mayflower to Vilonia brought another round of destruction.
“It was totaled,” Rick said of the house. “We just tore everything down to the slab and totally rebuilt.”
One of Rick’s friends who showed up to help the day after the storm was Kendall Casey, head of the computer-aided drafting and design — or CADD — department at Arkansas State University-Beebe. While his help in the demolition of Rick and Marilyn’s home was appreciated, Casey said he could think of better ways he could be of service.
“I just thought, ‘This isn’t my best way to help them,’” Casey said. “I asked them if they were planning on rebuilding and if they wanted some assistance with their floor plans. I thought the university would be able to help and
provide that service for them.”
In the CADD program at ASU-Beebe, students utilize computer programs to produce professional-quality drawings, residential and structural construction modeling, and contour mapping, among other projects. This past week, the program received formal accreditation from the Association of Technology, Management and Applied Engineering.
Rick said he and Marilyn were planning to rebuild their home, and they took Casey up on his offer to help with the floor plans. These plans usually cost between $500 and $1,000, and it can cost more if there are multiple changes to the plans. Instead, Casey and a recent graduate, Gretchen Hommrich, did the plans for free.
“It was a tremendous help,” Rick said. “You’ve got to have plans. We were able to sketch out what we wanted it to look like, and he could take that and transform it into what it would look like on paper. We knew what we wanted to build, and we were able to draw a rough draw.”
Casey said he would have had more students working on the project, but the opportunity presented itself after graduation, and most students had left for the summer. Now, however, he said he has plenty of students who will be able to help should the need arise again.
“I have a whole army ready now,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind at all carrying this on and helping others.”
Families who lived near the Kelleys and along the path of the tornado heard about Casey’s plan to help the Kelley family, and soon Casey was getting calls from other families in need. He and Hommrich ended up working with six families who lost their homes to the tornado and made sure to give them as much time as possible to make adjustments to the plans.
“Everyone had a good idea of what they wanted,” Casey said. “Most of the time they had some relatively good sketches, but when we got everything to scale, we might see some trouble issues where maybe there wasn’t as much room as they thought. We’d continue to work with them until they were satisfied.”
Casey said he always encouraged the families to meet with the builders to double-check the plans, and he said he was pleased with the responses he heard after those meetings.
“The Kelleys in particular talked to their builder and said he was impressed with the drawings,” he said. “He thought they were well done, which helped reassure me about it.”
Casey said it was important to him to keep the project focused on the people who lost their homes. At one point, someone who had not lost a home asked if Casey could help design floor plans for a new home to be built on a piece of land that had been damaged in the storm, but Casey decided that was not the kind of project he wanted.
“I didn’t feel that it fit the directive,” he said. “I wanted to keep it focused on those who had to rebuild their house.”
After living in a camper trailer for five months, Rick and Marilyn moved into their new home four weeks ago. In 1982 they lost everything, but this time they were able to save a lot of their belongings. Most of their possessions were stored away until the new home was built, and Rick said that for a long time they did not really know what they had, what they had lost and what was no longer usable.
Now that they are in the house, Rick said, he and his wife’s lives are getting back to normal. Their things are unpacked, and the interior of their home is decorated. The couple plan to start working on the yard this spring. Rick said they have been extremely happy with the house and are thankful for the time Casey took designing the plans.
“We talked about what we would do different,” he said. “Even after it’s built, you think of that every day. So far, we haven’t found anything we would have done different.”
Staff writer Angela Spencer can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or aspencer@arkansasonline.com.