Eric Thompson with framed Front Pages of the Vindicator and the Tribune Chronicle from the 1985 tornado. Photo by R. Michael Semple

Compiled by Metro Editor

Marly Reichert

It was the evening of May 31, 1985, when an F-5 tornado ripped through Trumbull County and swirled into Pennsylvania.

It originated just west of Newton Falls, destroying most of the town, before moving through Lordstown and Warren. In Niles, it destroyed the Top O’ The Strip roller skating rink and a strip plaza.

It also leveled hundreds of houses and ripped through Niles Union Cemetery before heading toward state Route 82, where it ripped through Hubbard and Brookfield before leaving Ohio and causing more destruction in western Pennsylvania.

In all, 12 people died in Trumbull County — nine in Niles alone — and many more were hurt.

Everyone remembers where they were or what they were doing when Mother Nature did her worst 40 years ago this weekend. Below are some of those stories from people who were there.

FD HELPS

Tom Buydos, a captain with the Coitsville Fire Department, was at dinner at the home of fellow firefighter Joe Sokevitz and his wife, Eleanor, when their pagers went off, alerting them that Hubbard Township needed their help in the Kermont Heights neighborhood, where the tornado ripped through numerous homes.

The neighborhood is just north of Chestnut Ridge Road and state Route 7.

Buydos and Sokevitz traveled to the Coitsville Township Fire Department, joined up with about 10 other volunteer fighters and took a fire truck about 7 miles to Hubbard Township.

“We were instructed to look for and help trapped victims and to shut off gas meters,” Buydos said.

It is critical to shut off the gas to homes badly damaged by such a storm because of the risk that the gas will explode.

The Coitsville firefighters discovered some gas meters were near the street and were not difficult to turn off, but others were near the houses and not easy to find because they were under the rubble because of collapsed porches.

Some of the gas lines had ruptured, and Buydos could hear them hiss.

“You don’t want that free gas just floating around,” he said.

Coitsville firefighters spent about six hours in the neighborhood.

The people who lived there were checking to make sure everyone was accounted for, Buydos said.

After being at the scene for about a half hour, their pagers went off again, alerting them to expect another tornado in about 20 minutes. Luckily, that was a false alarm, Buydos said.

There were no deaths or serious injuries in that neighborhood despite many homes being badly damaged or destroyed. The residents had all gotten out of their homes on their own.

“Some houses were destroyed, others just a little damaged,” he said. “It was strange. A couple of houses, it just took the spouting. It didn’t touch the rest of the house. And then there were houses that were right down to the ground, just gone,” he said.

“One house was picked up and set out in the street. Several gas mains were ripped out of the ground and were whistling due to the high pressure,” he said.

The trees in the neighborhood were “gone,” Buydos said. “That’s when I learned that pine trees don’t grow deep.”

The Chestnut Ridge area of Hubbard Township also suffered serious damage. Evan Evans of Hubbard-Thomas Road in Hubbard Township was killed.

A disheartening and surprising thing that happened was to see a couple of dozen looters show up in the neighborhood, taking lawn mowers, weed whackers and tool boxes, Buydos said.

“We’re still shutting off gas meters, and they’re taking things out of garages,” he said.

Buydos served on the Coitsville Fire Department from 1970 to 1992.

‘WALKING AROUND LIKE ZOMBIES’

Niles resident Glen Laraway of Bowman Street said he remembers tornado watches and later, tornado warnings, on TV.

“It was really hot and humid and the sky had a greenish look to it. I never saw a sky like that before,” he said.

Laraway said a friend had stopped that day, and he went with him to Walden’s bookstore in the Eastwood Mall and then to get something to eat.

“It rained really hard, and there was hail. When we were inside the mall, the power went out. There were sirens going off everywhere. We could not come home on Route 46 to get to my home. We had to go through Warren and then come back by Republic Steel. When I did get home, the whole neighborhood was trashed with trees knocked over, powerlines down, debris everywhere and rooftops off houses. People were walking around like zombies,” Laraway said.

He said about 20 houses on Cynthia Street and Nancy Street were flattened by the tornado.

His home was near the former Lincoln Elementary School, which also had damage. Laraway said he remembers a roofing nail stuck in the side of his garage. It is still there as a reminder of the storm. In his yard, a 119-year old oak tree was knocked over, and there was a back part of someone’ boat and many golf balls.

Laraway’s wife worked at the Elks Club and could not get to their street, so she left her car in a lot on Route 422 and walked a mile home.

Laraway said his phone would still work on occasion for some unexplained reason.

“At 10:30 p.m. I had a knock on the door, and I thought it was a neighbor needing help. When I opened the door, there were 20 National Guard outside and one asked me if my phone worked since he needed to call his commanding officer to find out where they were to be. They were not familiar with the area. I told them my phone was still working at times so they called their commander and then went to where they had to go,” Laraway said.

He said he went to Niles Union Cemetery, which had been demolished, with part of the mausoleum gone. He had worked for the city at the cemetery after high school graduation.

Laraway said he remembers a former firefighter telling him some children were waiting outside the Top O’ The Strip roller rink to get inside that night.

“They had gotten there early but when the sky got dark, they left and took shelter. One boy had injuries to his eyes because of the wind, but the others were OK,” he said.

Laraway said everyone he spoke with who saw the tornado said it looked like a giant black mass and sounded like a freight train.

SHARON CHANNELL

Sharon Channell, then residing with her husband, Elmer, and their sons, Elmer Jr., Bill and Bryan, on Market Street in Newton Falls, was made aware of the tornado by her son.

“Billy heard it, he was sitting in the living room and at first he thought it was a train because there are tracks just down the road. He went out and looked and came running back in because there was a tornado out there. So then I went to the basement. We were probably half a mile from it,” Channell said.

The destruction was so great that the National Guard arrived in town that evening to deter looters and stayed four to five days, Channell said.

It was hard for her to understand how someone would want to take advantage of others during a disaster.

Although the tornado became national news and put Newton Falls “on the map,” there were many at the time who didn’t even realize it had happened.

“A lot of people didn’t even know there’d been a tornado,” she said.

Like many small communities, Newton Falls used a “safety force” of individuals serving their community for $1 a year to assist police with traffic or crowd control at community events. Clayton Reakes was captain of the safety force and received credit for his quick action that no one was killed, and on his tombstone there is an engraving of a tornado.

“My husband, Elmer, was on the safety force and that night he took me and we walked through downtown. It’s very scary, boats upended, cars stacked on each other at the Ford dealership, part of the school was gone, the gym was gone where they had been preparing for graduation,” Channell said.

Behind Neidhart’s, there was a big two-story white house and that was the American Legion then. There were a lot of women there playing bingo that night, and Clayton Reakes hit the tornado siren and they all got under the tables and no one got hurt. The tornado flattened the house. A new Legion was built later on East River Road.

“They were very lucky no one got killed. It took out the bowling alley, a barber shop, the post office, and the Ford dealership. I know mom worried about us down in West Virginia because it (the news) said it wiped out the town,” Channell said.

The destruction was widespread, random and incomprehensible.

“That’s one reason I’m so scared of storms because I know what they can do, and it’s not pretty. We were very lucky. God watched over us. All we had was no phone, but I remember we took water to someone in Newton Village who didn’t have any,” she said.

A few weeks after the tornado, a friend of Channell’s received canceled checks in the mail. They had landed in someone’s yard in Pennsylvania and someone mailed them back to her.

JUDY PRICE

For Judy Price of Hubbard, slowing down or falling as the tornado wreaked havoc across the county could have meant the difference between life and death.

“I told my husband I’m not gonna make it, because I was heavy then,” Price, now 81, said. “I said ‘I can’t do this’ and he said ‘yes, you can’, and we were running.”

Price said they were first made aware of the tornado when she and her husband were going up Chestnut Ridge Road, where she still resides. She said a man came down leaning out of his truck, and she assumed he wanted them to turn around. After they went a little farther, they saw debris.

“We pulled into the yard of my uncle’s, we ran into the house and the shingles from the garage were hitting the back of the house when we made it up the steps,” Price said. “When we came back out, there were no steps.”

‘OUR FLAG WAS STILL THERE’

While passing through the main street in Newton Falls or pausing at the traffic light, one would never notice a small inconspicuous object above the door at 41 E. Broad St., today the location of a medical center. The small object is a flagpole bracket used to display the American flag.

The flag is also used to mark holidays, special events or other festive occasions. However, the purpose of that bracket being placed there was anything but festive. It marked the temporary location of the post office after the tornado ravaged the town on May 31, 1985. I notice that bracket often because I was the one who put it there.

After the tornado struck, the Youngstown Post Office Maintenance Department was the first to respond, securing the Newton Falls building, mail and making temporary repairs on the building. The moving of mail carrier cases and other equipment and furniture began promptly and I assisted in the process.

On one occasion, the Postmaster gave me an assignment: Amidst the hectic effort to move and set up operations on the inside of the Post Office, one important item was overlooked on the outside of the building. We had forgotten the flag. Down the street at the local hardware store, I obtained a flag and mounted it.

Sometime later, as I reflected on the day the flag was mounted, a historic analogy occurred to me: Placing the flag on the building while coworker Bruce Davenport secured the ladder among the rubble, the thought of the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima came to mind.

And our flag was still there.

• written by Anthony Santone, Newton Township

MAGIC SHOW INTERRUPTED

Former Newton Falls Councilman Eric Thompson, owner of Satolli Carpet in downtown Warren, lived in Howland when the tornado struck. He was performing a comedy magic show at the Grand Resort ballroom at the Avalon Inn in Howland for a roomful of real estate agents.

He said during his magic show, tree limbs and other debris kept falling on the golf course, but no one knew yet what was happening.

“The power went out, and people kept leaving the room in pairs to use the pay phone in the lobby,” Thompson said, noting this was a time before cellphones. “Pretty soon, more people started leaving and they would come back into the room and whisper to the people next to them. Within 20 minutes, everyone knew a tornado had hit a short distance away and everyone left.”

His wife, Sue, was at the ballfield in Newton Falls with some friends when they heard that some first responders got called to Mesopotamia to help because the tornado hit there about 30 minutes before it struck Newton Falls.

When it hit Newton Falls, the first responders couldn’t get back because there were so many trees across the road on state Route 534.

Thompson has a photo album of pictures of the storm’s aftermath and one of his favorites is a bicycle wrapped around and embedded in a tree at the dead end of Helen Street in Niles at Dragon Drive.

MESOPOTAMIA

“It touched down on Old State Road (Route 608) in Middlefield, and then it came down to Parkman Mespo Road and it bounced off and hit Mespo,” Betty Weaver said.

“I was 28 years old with six children and my mother had passed away two months before that. I had three girls in school that had just graduated the day before and a kindergartener, a first grader, and a second grader. They came home with their papers and of course I displayed them on the walls and the doors.”

Weaver’s husband worked afternoons at Johnson Rubber.

“When it started thundering, I went up to my dad’s because I always went up to mom and dad’s when it stormed, and I was talking to my brother and sister because they were there. So I went back home because it started clearing up and then later on it started thundering again so I went back up and I was like ‘oh this color isn’t right.’ The sun was kind of pinkish purplish, and it just didn’t look right and we all went into the house. My dad went outside to take his horses out to the pasture and he came back and said, ‘There’s a tornado coming.’ We were going to go in the basement, but there was like a foot of water because the sump pump wasn’t working, and so I told my children to come with me and we just huddled in one corner of the house, because I didn’t want them to drown. All of a sudden it just sounded like a freight train passing the window. My dad was standing out by the sink window watching it all, never taking cover,” Weaver said.

The tornado had gone right by the house, destroying anything that got in its way.

“I had a nephew there and of course the windows all blew out, and the glass went flying and it hit my nephew in the back of his neck, and it hit a main artery. It really bled,” she said.

After it was quiet, the family went out to see the damage. My dad went outside and came back in and said, ‘Betty, your house is gone.'”

LAST DAY OF SCHOOL

May 31,1985, a Friday, was the last day of school for students in Newton Falls. It was a bright and sunny day, but hot and humid already.

Melissa Channell was lying face down with her head hanging over the edge of her bed reading and listening to the new headphones she received for her birthday. It rained, it hailed and the sun came out. The electricity was off though, so she thought maybe somebody hit a pole.

The doorbell rang and Melissa’s aunt stood there with her neighbor, all of the kids and their dogs.

“We just had a tornado!” said Teresa, with her eyes as big as saucers. Melissa’s cousin Heather had jumped into her arms. The house right next door to her aunt had been lifted up and placed upside down in the same spot.

The moms went into action and sent all of the children and dogs to the basement in case there should be another tornado while they went to try the CB in the car. Melissa’s father and brother had been out golfing when they heard on the radio that Newton Falls had just “been wiped off the map.” It took them longer than normal to get home because they had to take the back roads since the National Guard was already stationed around the town.

The next day was Saturday and the family rode around trying to find places open to buy water because there was a boil alert. The thing that struck Melissa the most was the damage to the trees — it used to be that one couldn’t see across town, but the tornado had cut a path and jumped from one place to the other.

Some businesses were destroyed never to be rebuilt while others rebuilt bigger. When school began in the fall of 1985, the seventh and eighth graders were bussed out to Lordstown, while the high schoolers were able to utilize the remaining areas of the still standing school building.

LITTLE LEAGUE

We were holding Little League baseball practice behind the Bristol school. There were six coaches and approximately 15 children, ages 11-12, for G League practice. We heard sirens and emergency vehicles coming from Champion and heading north through Bristol on state Route 45.

We were not aware of anything that might be happening. A little later, a couple volunteer firemen from the Bristol Fire Department, which was across the road from the school, recommended that we shut down practice. They told us that a tornado had touched down in North Bloomfield and recommended that we seek shelter.

We couldn’t take the kids into the school because it was after hours. We walked the kids to the east side of the school building and waited outside for the parents to come for their children. Of course, there were no cellphones back then.

Like most practices, parents bring their children to practice, drop them off, and return in about two hours to pick them up. We held the kids there for at least an hour until the parents arrived. The majority of the parents were not aware of the tornado. Thankfully, no other inclement weather came through and everyone was safe.

I would consider the coaches as heroes for maintaining coolness for the kids. The kids also deserve credit for being obedient and understanding of the situation.

• written by former Little League coach Wayne Johnson

SOFTBALL GAME CANCELED

The 11 & 12 year old girls fastpitch Hot Stove League teams from Newton Falls and Braceville had a game scheduled May 31, 1985. Just after they started, there was a quick rain shower. The coaches decided the weather wasn’t going to get any better and called the game. Within 15 minutes, the field was cleared.

As I backed my ’66 Ford Falcon van down my driveway, a small sapling I had planted last year leaned almost to the ground then sprang back up again.

What the heck was that, I wondered. I pushed the button on the garage door remote, but nothing happened. No power.

My daughter got out of the van and went in the front door while I locked up the van. By the time I got into the house, the family had the candles, flashlight and the battery powered radio out. We found out about all the tornadoes.

“Oh my God, I hope the Braceville team got through town before the tornado hit” my wife exclaimed. There were no cell phones, no texting, so we had no way to know.

A well supplied our water and without power, there was no water. We had a family gathering in the Pittsburgh area Saturday afternoon. So I called to check if we could come down that night. Of course it was okay, so we packed up and headed out.

Sunday morning, my wife called a neighbor to see if the power was back on and it was. We said our goodbyes and headed home.

As a member of the church council, I wanted to stop at Messiah Lutheran Church to check on its status. We got to the church just after noon, there were still a few folks around. I found out that there was a work party at 9 a.m. downtown Monday morning.

There were probably a dozen people gathered around when I got there at 9 a.m. Young and old, male and female; the in-charge person assigned us areas that needed work. And for the next six hours, we picked up and swept up all kinds of broken stuff.

The cars at the Ford Dealership were stacked on top of one another. Two feet of a 6-foot 2″x 4″ was jammed through a chain link fence.

• written by William Brutsche

‘CIRCLING BIRDS’

I remember this day as being a Friday. We had finished watching Channel 27 news, and as the news ended, the woman anchor mentioned there may be some severe weather arriving. My wife, two small children (5 and 9), and I went to visit my grandmother in Masury on Chestnut Street.

While visiting, we heard the TV report of a tornado warning with damage in Niles. Since my grandmother lived in a mobile home, we helped her get to the neighbor’s basement. As we were going to the neighbors, I could see in the sky what I thought were circling birds within the clouds and remember telling the family to hurry to the basement. Only later did I realize this was the edge of the tornado with flying debris that I mistook as birds.

I departed the basement a short time later and saw the tornado about a mile or two away from me as it came down Chestnut Road across Standard Avenue near the former US Steel plant. I was looking south viewing the tornado. Interestingly, when I turned to look north, the sky was a clear blue.

Afterward, we returned to Hubbard. As we drove up the route 62 freeway from Masury, the road was littered with debris, the most noticeable being insulation. As we got near the Kermont Heights area in Hubbard Township, I could see the damaged homes adjacent to the freeway. I stopped to see if anyone needed help. People at the homes along the freeway yelled there was natural gas leaking and not to come to the area. Since I had my family with me, I returned to the car and went home.

We were amazed once we returned to Hubbard that the weather was clear and some of our neighbors were unaware of the damage that had been done a few miles away.

• written by Larry and Donna Pavone, Hubbard

AT THE HOSPITAL

Terry Waldman of Warren was on the fifth floor of Trumbull hospital visiting his father when an alarm went off, alerting to the danger of severe weather.

“They took all of the beds out of all the rooms and wheeled them into the center space where the elevators were, and we had to stay there until an ‘all clear.’ It was strange to see them move all of the patients out of the rooms,” he said.

He helped his mother down the stairs and went home to check on his wife, who was at home about a block away.

After the weather threat had passed, Terry’s wife Ann Waldman reported to work the next day at St. Joseph Hospital, where she was a registered nurse assigned to a medical floor.

“The hospital had only one emergency plug in each room. With the electric beds, it was not a good day at work that day,” Ann said. “The hospitals had disaster drills,” she said, but they focused on events like train derailments or bus accidents, “They didn’t really, at that time, have the idea that the disaster would happen in the hospital.”

In the midst of it all, life continued on — a neighbor’s son was graduating high school and the party was supposed to go on the next day. Unable to send back the food and other provisions, the party went on — with a generator running strings of lights to provide illumination.

TIM AND DEBBIE JORDAN

Tim and Debbie Jordan of Newton Falls had stepped down to the corner newsstand near the entrance to the East River Gardens neighborhood where they lived to play some numbers and visit with neighbors when they learned of an oncoming tornado.

Tim was outside, watching the sky, when he noticed something amiss. “I looked up to the sky and saw debris go by,” he said.

He stepped around the building and saw the tornado heading their way.

“That’s when I ran inside and told everyone to get down, there’s a tornado heading right for this building,” Tim Jordan said.

“When a tornado moves in, it drops the barometric pressure so fast it pops your ears,” he said. “I thought right then I was going to die in the tornado.”

The pregnant store clerk, the Jordans and another customer crowded into a utility closet, hugging tight to a hot water tank while the storm thundered overhead. They stood up to find themselves covered in mud and leaves — and the roof gone from the store.

“It sounded like a freight train thundering overhead,” Debbie Jordan said. The family walked through wires and debris to their home; they found it destroyed and the family pet parakeet was missing. Left undamaged — Tim’s dirt bike, which had been left behind all of the property stored in the garage. Everything else was gone. He got on his bike and drove through the neighborhood, finding people with injuries and taking them to where help was.

“We were all traumatized,” he said, “but I made sure everyone got to the fire station.”

The bike, he said, had been spared for a reason.

Also spared was Debbie’s pet parakeet Chip. He was found safe in a closet the next day when they returned to see if anything from the home could be salvaged.

EMS PLAN IN ACTION

Don Bloom and his partner at Lane LifeTrans helped create the first disaster response plan in Trumbull County. Bloom, a paramedic at the time, stopped at work to collect an ambulance, met his partner and watched the plan they’d created together spring into action and save lives.

Their plan set up a system to find and triage people being rescued in a mass casualty event. They set up an emergency command post in Niles and helped — and listened — as EMS crews ran through the plan they’d created, taking patients to designated hospitals based on geography and avoiding overwhelming any one facility.

From their command post in a Niles apartment complex, they were dispatched all over the community — first to make sure the emergency crews in Newton Falls were handling things, then to Niles to help with rescue efforts in the plaza that housed the roller rink.

All across the area, through the devastation, Bloom said he saw people coming together to help those who needed it.

“The public showed up,” he said.

Private cranes came out to the destroyed plaza, lifting girders and helping search for survivors. People, even though they were traumatized from the damage, made sure their neighbors got medical help. Coming out of their command post for another rescue, they saw that spirit that had drawn everyone together once again — Bloom and his partner were heading down Route 46 into Niles, where people were trapped inside a convenience store across from the cemetery. The area had suffered a direct hit.

“There were people trapped inside and the road was blocked. We couldn’t get there. Well, the public saw that and just started moving things with their own hands,” Bloom said.

It was six days before the men went off duty. After the storm, Bloom and his partner spoke across the state and country, showing other emergency agencies how the plan had worked in Trumbull County, and how it could be used in other situations to save lives.

Bloom went on to join the National Disaster Medical System, deploying all around the country to wherever his skills as a paramedic could be used in a time of need. After September 11, he joined the mortuary service of the NDMS and helps identify victims from information supplied by their families. He said his most recent deployment was to the Potomac River plane crash in January.

LEARNING ABOUT THE STORM FROM CALIFORNIA

Beverly Fittipaldo of Warren was the first speaker at a health care meeting in Ventura, California, on June 1, 1985. Having arrived early, she sipped her coffee and opened the Los Angeles Times to see a headline and a photo about the tornado near her family in Niles and Warren.

From the bank of phones near the conference room, she called her mother, Sally Nastal Fittipaldo and surprisingly got right through.

“In any crisis they or I have experienced — the Kent State shootings, the Northridge earthquake, less than 5 miles from my home, the tornado, I always called my mother and reached her,” Fittipaldo said in a handwritten letter.

She said her sisters and their families had gathered at her house. There were downed trees, roof shingles missing and some property damage. Everyone was shaken, but safe. Her niece had been at the Eastwood Mall when it occurred, but her stepfather was able to pick her up.

“Later, the late Tom Daily, the love of my life and owner of the former Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Stakeout on Youngstown Road in Niles, just west of the mall, described many incidents and destruction to me. Most memorable: Fireman stopped by his establishment and asked for a bucket of ice because they had found a hand. And his lovely Lincoln Continental ended up with a sandpaper finish,” Fittipaldo wrote.

WATCHING FROM THE CAR

Ray Gollan, owner of Gollan’s Honda-Suzuki in Warren, said he was 15 or 16 when the tornado hit and he and his family were in the car on their way home to Brookfield and watched the whole thing. He said they saw it at Macali’s Giant Eagle in Niles and watched it hit the Top O’ the Strip roller rink.

“It was parallel with us at Warner Road and Chestnut Ridge. We watched it destroy houses on Chestnut Ridge and race down Route 82,” Gollan said. “I developed a fascination with tornadoes and learned about them, so I can now identify damage from straight line winds versus a tornado.”

He said he chased a funnel cloud from Niles to Austintown a few years ago. He said the funnel cloud never touched down, but he saw siding being ripped off houses.

“That 1985 tornado definitely changed my perspective on the power of Mother Nature,” Gollan said.

ANIMAL SHELTER

Twin sisters Mary and Barbara Busko established the Animal Welfare League’s first shelter on Brunstetter Road in Lordstown. It opened Aug. 16, 1984.

Mary Busko said May 31, 1985, started off as a gorgeous day that turned deadly. They didn’t know if the shelter had been hit so they got in the car to go check, but the closer they got to Lordstown, the more the roads became impassable because of the downed trees and debris on the roads. They finally found a back way from Austintown and the shelter was still standing even though the tornado passed less than 500 feet in front of Brunstetter Road.

“Our staff rescued over 50 cats and dogs. Mostly dogs. Some were brought in by their owners, others were miles away from their home. Some were injured, but most were not,” Mary Busko wrote in a letter. “We were already overcrowded so we put out an appeal. Molly Rush of Countryside Kennels, Rochelle Naylor of SharLar Kennels and a dog breeder on Dover Street offered to help. Most of the pets were claimed by their owners, while others were relinquished and put up for adoption.”

Barbara Busko wrote that they were at Tassos and Maria Anastasiades’ beauty shop when they noticed how still it was outside around 6:30 p.m. and the sky was an unusual greenish blue.

“We had never seen a color like that before. Shortly after, the power went out and when it did not come back on, we left,” she wrote.

After learning a tornado touched down, they drove to the shelter and after learning it was safe, they called the Red Cross to volunteer to help. The Red Cross sent the sisters to Niles High School, which was a temporary shelter.

“Law enforcement and the National Guard checked everyone coming into the area. As we were reporting in, a Warren dentist, Dr. Gene Boruh and his wife Mariellen, called out to ask if we were volunteering and they said ‘come with us.’ We were a team of four. We delivered water and other supplies to people in the Niles area Saturday and Sunday (June 1 and 2),” Barbara Busko wrote.

“Until you see it with your own eyes, you cannot imagine how much destruction there was. We saw houses blown away and yet one in the middle still standing. Trees with unusual objects stuck in them.

“It is times like this that we see the best in humanity. The generosity and the caring. People donating money, supplies and volunteering. We saw the tears, the look of shock and sorrow on the faces of those who lost so much, and the gratitude for the supplies. We gave so many hugs to so many people. This was a moment in time we will remember for the rest of our lives,” she wrote.