DAWSON SPRINGS, Ky. — They were inside their home when a tornado tore it apart during the night of Dec. 10, but Sterling and Karen Wallace of Dawson Springs keep repeating that “God took care of us.”
Sterling Wallace remembers looking at the sky that evening “and it’s just dark.”
He and his wife decided to go downstairs to their basement, which was being rented out by their daughter and her family.
“We never felt the house shake,” Karen Wallace told The Western Kentucky Catholic, newspaper of the Owensboro Diocese. “God’s taken care of us. We heard it, felt the pressure, but the house never shook.”
Karen Wallace said their ears “popped” as they experienced the pressure change — typical of tornado weather — and they heard tinkling glass as the windows burst. At the time, though, they thought the tinkling was the sound of hail.
Thirty seconds later, it was all over.
When the family ventured upstairs, they saw the Christmas tree was knocked over, the windows were broken, and there was “lots of wind damage,” said Sterling Wallace. “Just glass everywhere.”
The next morning revealed the wider spread of destruction. The Wallaces’ porch had been torn off, their barn was gone, and all of their vehicles were totaled from being lifted up and tossed by the powerful winds.
What used to be a thick, wooded area of 35 acres around their home had been flattened.
“This driveway was full of trees,” said Sterling Wallace. If they had had a working car, they could not have even gotten out.
But in that moment, he experienced what would be the first of many acts of kindness from friends and strangers alike.
“A man came up who might have been Amish, and said, ‘Where do you want us to start?’” said Sterling Wallace.
The man brought along an entire team and eventually managed to clear the driveway.
Sterling Wallace said his life perspective has changed after receiving so much support from others: “In the beginning (I thought), ‘I can do all this myself.’“
“But this state came together, the churches, everybody,” said Sterling Wallace, who with his wife belongs to Resurrection Parish in Dawson Springs — which has supported them even while dealing with the destruction of its own church building.
This doesn’t mean it has been easy.
“My first reaction was to want to just run away,” said Karen Wallace. “(Before the storms) we’d replaced our windows, our bathroom and so much.”
They are both retired and it was not their plan to essentially gut and rebuild their home of 34 years: “We’re 66 years old, we’re rebuilding a house that we didn’t want to build,” she said.
Her husband said it is looking “a lot better” now that significant work is being done. But they have observed how “money comes out faster than it comes back in.”
“We were really, really blessed because insurance paid for us to go live somewhere else” during the repairs, said Sterling Wallace. “Lots of people don’t have that.”
Karen Wallace said, “You’ve just got to trust in God, know he’s in control. Anything we’re in need of, it works out.”
Editor’s note: Monetary donations may be given digitally via https://owensborodiocese.org/give. Checks may be mailed, with “Tornado Disaster Relief” written in the memo, to Catholic Charities, 600 Locust St., Owensboro, KY, 42301. To learn more about ways to help, call the McRaith Catholic Center at (270) 683-1545.