Posts tagged Stoughton-tornado

After escaping the clutches of the Illinois tollways and arriving in Madison, I got to my dad’s house, and while we were catching up I glanced over at the muted TV and saw the 10:00 local news flash “The Storm: One Year Later.” Strange to cover Katrina recovery on the local news, I thought, and then the scene cut to Stoughton, WI, where a major tornado strike (F-3 level) occurred last year on August 18. I happened to be visiting at the time; one of the touchdown points was about a half a mile from my mother’s house, and the tornado went on to tear up several homes not much farther down the road. For a week and a half, it reigned as the biggest natural disaster I had any truly personal connection to. I hadn’t forgotten it really, but it didn’t occur to me until the news came on that this is its anniversary.

It’s interesting to see now what short- and long-term responses the tornado has prompted around here. Even though it seems so small next to a hurricane, around 80 homes destroyed altogether and dozens more severely damaged makes a big impression in the few small towns hit. FEMA turned them down for disaster assistance, but there’s a Stoughton Area Long-Term Recovery Board helping coordinate SBA and other sorts of assistance, and a Stoughton Area Tornado Relief Fund, as well as at least one resident’s more personal resource site. Even though there’s a world of difference between the storms and their impact, there do seem to be a few points of comparison between “macro” and “micro” disasters and their aftermath. Hopefully Stoughton’s recovery-related intrigue and entanglements are correspondingly smaller too.