After tornado, rebuilding a home

Don Holmes stood in front of the big-screen television inside his small living room, ignoring the buzzer and automated voice urging him to take shelter immediately.

Then his small white house began to shake.

Holmes, 59, rushed to his desk and grabbed a flash drive before capturing his cat, Kiki. Finding refuge in the corner of his bathroom, he hugged Kiki so tightly that she likely thought Holmes would kill her.

After roaring across State Road 45, a tornado hit the structure. Trees with fresh spring blossoms surrounding the house came crashing down. Tree trunks and limbs penetrated the roof, exposing the inside to the dark, wet sky.

Windows shattered, and rafters snapped. The tin white siding was stripped off the exterior by the 110 miles-per-hour gusts. A couch and other valuables were yanked from the home, along with much of the roof.

Puddles of rain accumulated on the home’s old, brown carpet. The tornado took everything but the frame and foundation of two small bedrooms in the back, which used to house his two children, now grown.

As the tornado passed over the small structure, the strong wind ripped off the door on the home’s attic above him. Insulation and dirt fell onto his head.

A motivational poster with the word “opportunity” hung from the bathroom wall. But huddled on the floor, Holmes wondered if he was about to die.

***

The twister’s crushing destruction was followed by silence. Holmes walked out of the bathroom and into the living room, which was covered with debris.

On May 25, 2011, Holmes, now divorced, lost the house where he raised his family. But he did not leave. He kept living in the house he knew would never look the same again.

He had nowhere else to go.

More than a year later, his home would be rebuilt, and so would his life.

The house did not have power for six days following the disaster. Traffic on SR45, which runs parallel with the home’s front door, came to a standstill. Gawkers stood along the ditches, pointing camera lenses at the wreckage.

The traffic jam delayed workers’ progress on restoring the power lines. None of the gawkers offered assistance.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency approved disaster relief funding for municipalities suffering tornado damage but not for residents. To offset reconstruction costs, the State of Indiana awarded Holmes a $5,000 disaster relief grant established by taxes on fireworks sales.

A group of Amish men helped remove about 80,000 pounds of tree limbs that were crushing his roof.

But the help he really needed seemed like it would never come. He couldn’t afford to even start repairs on the house.

In October 2010, Holmes lost his job as a computer specialist when Comcast’s call center in Bloomington shut down.

He tried finding a new job without avail. He filed for unemployment, but the stipend was not enough to pay his bills.

In a desperate situation, he canceled his homeowner’s insurance, leaving him unprepared when the tornado struck.

Raised in a self-reliant farm family, Holmes did not ask his older brother or grown children for a place to live because he did not want to “impose.”

During the day he searched for jobs and continued working on his science fiction
trilogy.

Holmes, who has already published one book along with a collection of training manuals, began the trilogy long before the tornado struck. The first book, which is complete and about 90,000 words in length, was backed up on his flash drive.

The occupied house that looked long-abandoned remained in a state of detachment. Summer turned into autumn, and then snow began to fall. Thin sheets of white-tinted plastic were stapled to the windows’ empty frames, which stopped the wind but not the cold.

Every morning for about 11 months, Holmes awoke in his bed in his dining room because of the damage in the bedroom.

When it rained, he collected as much water as he could in buckets.

But Holmes’ largest obstacle was the traffic roaring down the highway beside his house — specifically noise from large trucks. At night, he would jump out of bed as a truck roared by, fearing it was another tornado.

“If certain authorities found out I was still living in the house, they might have kicked me out,” Holmes said. “But I didn’t have anywhere else to go at that point.”

***

Holmes’ residence could never be repaired, people said. It was too far gone.

Susan Scales, director of International Gospel Outreach Disaster Relief, disagreed. She had seen worse.

At the beginning of May, Scales and a small crew of volunteers arrived on Holmes’ doorstep. Catholic Charities of Indianapolis provided the group of Christian-affiliated disaster relief workers with the necessary funds to begin repairs. Scales became involved in disaster relief more than seven years ago, providing assistance to individuals from New Orleans to Texas and abroad.

Living in a neighborhood close to Holmes, Scales took refuge at IU Health Bloomington Hospital on the night of the twister. After years of working on the homes of those less fortunate, she was unwilling to put herself in danger.

Although her house was left unharmed, she knew she would have work to do following the disaster. Helping rebuild the lives of those who need assistance the most, she said, is her calling from God.

During reconstruction, Holmes agreed to live with his brother only temporarily. He loved his brother, but he also enjoyed his time alone. He needed it to keep writing.

Eventually, the remaining trees towering above the house were removed.

To prevent further water damage to the home, the crew first rebuilt the roof. On just one side, 39 of the 40 rafters needed to be replaced.

New windows were installed. Floorboards were built on the inside, and siding was installed on the outside. Because the two back bedrooms were unoccupied, they were closed off and saved as a task for later.

Months passed, and progress was slow, but Scales kept working, often by herself. Holmes worked at finding a job and offered assistance on the house when he could. He selected easy-to-install hardwood flooring and light gray paint for the walls.

On one occasion, Scales asked Holmes to clean the kitchen, and he went as far as bleaching the countertop. When Scales arrived the following morning, she was shocked to find a mess.

She found cereal dumped into the silverware drawer. A jar of peanut butter was covered in skid marks from rolling around on the floor, but it was never opened.

Raccoon footprints were a dead giveaway.

At first, Scales did not know where the animals were entering the house. That is, not until she followed a trail of Pop Tart crumbs. Reaching the wrapper, she discovered a hole in the wall near the back bedrooms and fixed the problem.

The small white house on SR 45 neared completion. Holmes found a part-time job in the hardware department at Menards and chipped away at his exhausting debt. Holmes smiled more.

But Scales had a problem. Almost all of her helpers had dispersed. Progress slowed, and the completion date kept getting pushed back.

That was changed by a text message. Holmes told Scales he needed to return home.  His brother was vacating his small Bloomington apartment and moving to Indianapolis for his job.

She was so close but had so much more to do. She didn’t want Holmes returning to the conditions in which he once lived.

“I am vowing he will be able to sleep in his bedroom,” Scales said. “I will not put that bed back in the dining room.”
She had a few days.

***

On Oct. 10, the day Scales said Holmes needed to move in, she only needed to finish installing the hardwood flooring in the dining and living rooms. When she arrived at about 9 a.m., workers from Lowe’s were already waiting outside to install new carpet in Holmes’ bedroom.

“As soon as you guys remove the carpet, he can actually move in,” Scales told the workers before telling them of a mistake she made a few days prior.

Scales typically carried her cell phone in the breast pocket of her flannel shirt. While working, she noticed her phone was missing.

“In this entire home, in this amount of space, in my one gallon of paint, there was my phone,” she said as the men laughed. “It had been in there for over an hour. Needless to say, it was ruined.”

Thinking about the hundreds of contacts she has accumulated during the last 17 years of disaster relief, she grabbed a paper towel, wiped off her hands and arms, wrapped the paint-dripping phone in the paper towel and drove to the nearest Verizon Wireless store.

With her phone still dripping paint, she explained to the workers how Verizon Wireless employees saved her contacts and gave her a “loaner” phone.

Then it was back to work. She had a lot of ground to cover. Installing the floor had been easy, but it was about to get more difficult. She needed to cut precise holes in the boards to wrap around the air vents in the floor.

It would require the use of the jigsaw she had borrowed, a tool she had never before used. Then Holmes arrived.

Scales took Holmes to his bedroom, where workers from Lowe’s had begun to lay the carpet.

“I’m going to get this done as much as I can get it,” Scales said to Holmes. “The only thing I probably won’t be able to do is trimming out around that window.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ll get it,” Holmes replied before the two walked back into the living room, where Scales showed Holmes the newly-installed, almost complete hardwood flooring.

“You did all this?” Holmes said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Oh yeah, I’ve been in here for days,” Scales said. “I’ve been all over this house. You know, every morning that I’ve been in here I’ve been really cold, so I flip the heat on. Then when I came in here yesterday morning and flipped it on, it didn’t come on.”

“Right now the gas is shut off,” Holmes said.

Without gas, there was no heat. Backed up on bills, the utilities company disconnected the gas. As it reached November, this wasn’t going to work. He wasn’t moving in like Scales had hoped.

Returning to the porch, Holmes instructed Scales how to use the jigsaw and cut the necessary 90-degree angles. As she worked, a small crucifix dangled from her neck.

“Now that should work,” Scales said, handing one of the last boards to Holmes.

“Not quite,” Holmes said, showing Scales that she had cut the board slightly too short. “You can make ’em shorter, but you can’t make ’em longer.”

After a second attempt, the board fit perfectly around the air vent. Soon, Scales laid the last board and the structure was ready for Holmes’ return.

With only a part-time job at Menards, money was still tight. Although he hoped to become full time, he knew it could take a few months. Until he could afford the deposit for gas, he had to stall.

***

Holmes redecorated his small house on Nov. 1 with the few personal items he had left. After paying his gas bill, he was able to move back in.

He hung a small Albert Einstein doll on the wall above the computer desk that was given to him by the best friend he has ever had.

He moved boxes of his belongings from his undamaged garage and piled them in the dining room. Two family-size boxes of Pop Tarts were put on the counter. He arranged the television and chairs in his living room, only a little different than it looked over a year ago.

He had one more trip to his brother’s house to grab some clothes and his cat Kiki.

But until then, he sat in a swivel chair at his old wooden desk, lit a cigarette and logged onto the website he was building to go along with the third book in his trilogy.

The walls surrounding him looked new. Sure, his home wasn’t perfect, and work still needed to be done. But Holmes once again had a roof over his head and a place to write in solitude. 

He was home.