“And then, within milliseconds, we weren’t in our beds or in our homes anymore. We were on the ground somewhere,” Glisson said Sunday, her voice trembling as she spoke. she pointed to an area perhaps. 200 feet away.
“When I opened my eyes and looked around. I didn’t know where I was. Not at all,” she said. “All I could do was stand up and scream for help and try to find someone to help me and my kids.”
Glisson suffered a broken arm, a wounded head and a bruised face. Her house was destroyed. But she is still alive, and her children are miraculously uninjured.
“It’s crazy. I can’t believe that me and my kids are okay,” said Glisson, standing amid the concrete and wood rubble, her now-totally devastated neighborhood. “I can’t believe there are no broken bones on my kids. That’s crazy.”
“I think lying on the mattress saved us because most of the time we were in the air, we were not just in the air, we were in the bed,” she said.
And “hundreds and hundreds” of survivors have no homes, Bailey said.
“We hope FEMA gets here and tries to set something up here,” Smiley told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday. “We are a small town… So it will be difficult to find a place to put temporary housing and furniture.”
President Joe Biden is scheduled to visit the area on Wednesday.
According to the coroner, 13 people were killed in Hopkins County and at least five of them in the vicinity of Glisson, including two elderly sisters who lived next to her.
“My kids love them,” said Glisson, who is still reeling from the trauma that night. “We talked to them every day.”
Glisson, her two children, and her mother now live in a motel room, an expense that eats away at the family’s meager savings. Friends donated some nights there, and they were given blankets and food. “But we had nowhere to go,” Glisson said.
Glisson is a stay-at-home mom with two kids who need her full-time attention. Her son is severely autistic and has a long list of other diagnoses, she said. Along with friends and volunteers, she is still searching for the drug he desperately needs to sleep Sunday in the rubble.
“He takes medicine every night to go to bed. He has a sleep disorder. And without the medicine, he can’t sleep. It’s a nightmare,” Glisson said, her voice cracking. “I’m telling you it’s a nightmare. No one can sleep if my son cries all night.”
No insurance
Glisson, 26, and so many others in Dawson Springs don’t have a clear rebuilding path. According to the mayor, about a third of the city’s population lives below the poverty line. According to the US Census Bureau, the median household income is just over $25,000.
“There’s going to be a lot of uninsured stuff,” Smiley said. “They live every month on Social Security checks or whatever they can get. They’re all good people.”
Glisson is not optimistic that her family will revive.
“My whole house is gone. We don’t have home insurance,” she said. “There’s no way we can recover from it.”
Walking through the rubble on her street, Glisson came across a man who helped her and her children get out of the rubble and find shelter in his basement shortly after the storm hit. . When he hugged her, she collapsed, sobbing.
“Thank you for helping us,” she said.
“That’s what we do,” the man replied.
Ed Lavandera and Ashley Killough reported from Kentucky. Theresa Waldrop reported and wrote from Atlanta.
