Just days after a deadly tornado killed three Henryville, Ind., residents and demolished the town's only school, Ball State students drove to Southern Indiana to help out.
Colleen Regan, a junior from Indianapolis, used her Spring Break to help with recovery efforts in Henryville.
"I still feel like it wasn't real," she said. "We saw school buses in buildings, and just like the news reports showed, we saw Henryville schools totally demolished. It wasn't livable."
What Regan saw was days after it happened, and no one was living there.
"The only people you saw were driving bulldozers or carrying donations," the special education major said. "The back of one house was totally ripped off. It looked like an empty dollhouse. It was hard to imagine what it was before, hard to imagine that people ever lived there."
Regan and her friend Kelly Barmore, also from Indy, visited the community 22 miles north of Louisville to clean and organize a warehouse that was to be used as a distribution center, which would offer food and other essentials for people who had lost their homes.
"We went into it not really knowing what we would have to do, and there was so much left that had to be done," Regan said.
"It was very hard to leave. The warehouse wasn't ready," she said. "This was right here in our neighborhood, and we felt like we were connected to these people."
The tornado struck six communities in Indiana, killing 14 people in the state, 19 in Kentucky, three in Ohio and one each in Alabama and Georgia, according to the Associated Press.
Barmore said she felt compelled to help with recovery efforts, especially since she had free time during last week's break.
"If this happened here, I know people from other communities would come and help us too, because that's the kind of state we live in," she said.
CHECKING IN BACK HOME
Junior Tara Murphy of Henryville was driving in Indianapolis on Friday night when she learned about the storm. She tried to call her mom and her brother, who is still in high school, and couldn't get a hold of anyone until a few hours later.
On her way down to the beach for Spring Break, the architecture major went to visit her family the next morning. She and her dad walked through town together.
"It was crazy to see one building that was fine by one building that was completely destroyed," she said. "Everything looked torn apart."
She said it was hard to see the people she had known all her life digging through the debris of what remained of their homes. Murphy said her dad was interviewed by an Indianapolis television reporter and started crying as he was talking about all the wreckage.
DAMAGE TO THE SCHOOL
The high school building also includes grade-school classrooms, and just over a third of the structure was destroyed, said John Reed, West Clark Community Schools assistant superintendent.
As restoration of the building begins, the district has moved children to other nearby schools in New Albany and Scottsburg.
Students who have lost their homes are living in motels or with relatives as donations pour in from across the region.
The Community Foundation of Southern Indiana is helping to put the pieces back together with the help of disaster relief agencies.
"The Red Cross and Salvation Army - no one does crisis relief better than them," foundation president and CEO Linda Speed said.
The Community Foundation's generosity has been directed to others in the past, including victims of Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in Japan.
"We've used it to help others and now we're using it here," she said.
Ball State students with southern Indiana connections watched the disaster aftermath through countless news updates.
Christopher Rios, an architecture student from Henryville, thought of a way to honor the stunned community - a man-sized sculpture of a hornet, the Henryville High School mascot.
So far he only has a drawing of the tribute sculpture, which he described as "this really tough-looking hornet-man hybrid," and wants to include an inspirational quote of some kind, he said.
Rios lettered in three sports and broke a couple of track records in his day. A photo of him even hung in the now-battered school gym.
"To see it all leveled sort of trivialized my entire existence in that part of my life," he said Monday, still shaken more than a week after the storm.
Like other students from small towns, after graduation he was ready to leave and never turn back. But the storm has changed him.
"No matter what, you still went to this school and it's still a part of you," he said.
"I realize how much I missed the place and how much it meant to me."
By the numbers
6 Indiana counties were declared in a state of disaster by Gov. Mitch Daniels last week
14 people died in Indiana
19 people died in Kentucky
3 people died in Ohio
1 person died in Alabama and 1 in Georgia
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