Surviving tornado a team-building experience
Woman among 250 students relocated from school, home; clings to one special thing during storm
7:22 p.m. Friday, June 13, 2008
Manhattan — “And we felt the vibrations of the tornado as it was going around us,” says Ashley Chapman, a student of the Flint Hills Job Corps. “It was really scary. There was a lot of damage. There are trees down everywhere.”
Chapman was about 30 feet from a tornado that struck Flint Hills Job Corps, where she lives at with her daughter, Ashlynn.
She holds Ashlynn close today, hoping they’ll never relive this experience again.
“Whenever you’re younger, you depend on your parents for shelter and stuff, like for instance, safety,” Ashley says. “And when you are a mother yourself, you have to stay calm for them because they depend on your for your safety.”
Ashley knows this well because, “I was in a tornado when I was little, which I had my mom,” she says. ”And this was the first one I’d been in that really affected us.”
And it affected nearly 250 other students at the job corps center. The tornado destroyed a building on this foundation, just 30 feet from the main housing unit on campus.
The job center is down, with heavy roof tiles scattered on the streets.
Job Corps director Steve Reitan says students have been sent away from this community for an early summer break, though clean-up crews have come in to restore what’s damaged.
“The challenge is to keep people’s spirits going and appreciating what we do have and trying to always move forward,” says Reitan, who has worked with Flint Hill Job Corps for 18 years.
Reitan says last week’s hailstorm and tornado have been incredible. He wants to be sure his students and staff are safe.
And Reitan says it can be a great teambuilding experience – though it’s something he doesn’t want to repeat.
From re-installing power lines to sweeping up debris, Reitan estimates half-a-million dollars in damage after last week’s hailstorm. He expects twice that with the tornado, with the destruction of one building, roofs of at least two destroyed, in addition to dozens of windows broken.
As for Ashley, the storm didn’t dent her wallet, but she learned one lesson.
“To keep my composure a lot. I was getting really stressed out, and so going through that and seeing the next day and seeing everything that happened, um, things could always be worse. You have to appreciate what you have when you have it.”
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