A year later, Kent Island still feeling the effects of devastating tornado
Sunflowers, coneflowers and forget-menots.
Chris Wiseman has never planted these at her Bay City home on Kent Island. Still, they sprouted this spring and thrived.
For Wiseman, they’re a reminder of the tornado that devastated the island in the early hours of July 24, 2017. She’s sure the flowers were carried to her property with the110 mph winds that left a trail of destruction 2.37 miles long and 150 yards wide, damaging 233 properties with at least 11 destroyed across the island.
One year later, the worst of the damage has been hauled away and repaired. Yet on Kent Island there are still scattered blue roof tarps, yards stripped of shade trees and a lingering fear of storms to come.
Wiseman woke up that morning to the sound of water gushing through her home. A massive tree branch had crashed through her living room ceiling. Her home has been rebuilt, thanks to insurance.
“It looks like myhomenow,” she said. She’s still adjusting to her yard. She lost more than 30 trees behind the house.
Bay City neighbors Kathy and Don Trotter keep a chunk of the tree that fell on two of their cars on display in their foyer. “We survived 2017 tornado!” Kathy Trotter, 57, wrote on the wood, adding a heart with their names. Her husband, 69, engraved the date of Chris Wiseman gestures to her yard on Kent Island that was denuded of dozens of trees during last years's tornado. the tornado.
They don’t plan on forgetting what Kent Island went through. They couldn’t if they tried.
He recalled walking through his neighborhood the morning after the storm to help with debris and consult with those with insurance concerns. Trotter works at a company insuring small businesses, and wanted to help advocate for his neighbors.
“That’s how I got to meet everybody,” he said. “Before you would drive down the road and someone would beep their horn at you and you would wave but wouldn’t know who they are. Now we know who they are. We know all our neighbors by name.”
Those neighbors include Lucy Kruse and Scott Saunders, who created a tree planting coalition to get $40,000 worth of new trees planted.
Kruse, who lives on Kent Island but was not affected by the storm, posted on Facebook and rallied people such as Saunders to organize volunteers to remove debris and plant trees. One weekend in October, the group planted 400 trees.
“Getting those people just something as simple as trees did a lot to restore their hope that life was eventually going to come back to normal,” Kruse said.
Farmer John’s produce stand, a longtime Kent Island fixture, is at a crossroads. Todd Cimaglia, 45, has sold produce, plants and snowballs at the stand for the last decade. He wasoverseas whenhegotthetornadoalerton his phone. Then he got the call from his wife.
“Todd, I just went by the stand… it’s all gone.”
The stand had been blown about 100 yards into the woods behind Romancoke Road in Stevensville. Some of the stand’s roof and refrigeration were found in a townhouse community about half a mile away. Price cards for produce were found as far as Queenstown, about10 miles away.
Cimaglia was able to get the stand going again with assistance from a GoFundMe appeal organized by a friend, but just getting up and running again wasn’t enough, he said. Once his lease expires at the end of the year, he said he will shut down. The land is being sold for development. So far he hasn’t found another location for the stand.
Even for those who have recovered, there’s a lasting impact. Don Trotter says his wife still worries whenever a large storm approaches.
“I tell her lightning doesn’t strike twice, but she’s traumatized. We’ve had some heavy downpours and she really gets upset by it,” he said.