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Chris Bullock has a lot to be grateful for as she decorates her new home for Christmas, after spending much of the past year in a camper with her family.
One year ago Saturday, a massive tornado obliterated wide swaths of her Kentucky hometown of Dawson Springs, leaving her homeless after a terrifying night of death and destruction.
Things look much different now.
In August, Bullock and her family moved into their new home, built free of charge by the disaster relief group God’s Pit Crew. It sits on the same site where their home of 26 years was wiped out.
“God’s sent blessings to us,” Bullock said in a phone interview Friday. “Sometimes we feel there’s a little guilt, if you will. Why were we spared?”
The holiday season tragedy killed 81 people across Kentucky and turned buildings into mounds of rubble as damage reached into hundreds of millions of dollars. Elsewhere in the state, Mayfield took a direct hit from the swarm of December tornadoes, which left a wide trail of destroyed buildings and shredded trees. In Bowling Green, a tornado wiped out an entire subdivision.
It was part of a massive tornado outbreak across the Midwest and the South.
In Dawson Springs and other Kentucky towns in the path of the storms, homes and businesses have been springing up steadily in recent months. Government assistance, private donations and claims payouts by insurers have poured into the stricken western Kentucky region.
“It’s more than encouraging,” said Jenny Beshear Sewell, the mayor-elect of Dawson Springs and a cousin of Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear.
