HOLLY—A year later, this town is healing, but not healed.
A year later, the signs of the twister that devastated Holly after dark on March 28, 2007, are fading, but not gone.
Out on West Cheyenne Street, a house sits abandoned, its tornado-smashed windows covered with sheets of plywood, its front porch sagging. A block away, a pale orange X marks the front of another home, a sign left by a rescue crew.
But there are also signs of progress, of renewal.
On the south side of Cheyenne, in between the two tornado-damaged houses, stands a brand new home, with stately green siding and white trim. Up on North Highland Street, it looks like a suburban subdivision, with finished or nearly finished houses up and down both sides, construction trucks and trailers parked along the curb and bare-earth yards waiting for a landscaper.
And plans have been adopted to overhaul Main Street, work possible only in the wake of disaster.
“It’s been a heck of a year,” said Kammie Cathcart, president of the city’s branch of Colorado East Bank & Trust and one of the leaders of Holly Pride, a volunteer organization that carries on projects in the town.
Community caught unaware
The storm that hit Holly came utterly without warning. A day of severe weather seemed to have broken, a storm watch had expired and cloud watchers had wrapped up and headed home. And then the twister formed just outside town and moved north. In minutes, it fatally injured two people, destroyed 43 homes and beat up 137 others.
Today, the progress is palpable. The heavily damaged water system has been repaired. A blueprint for Gateway Park – new trees, new playgrounds, new picnic shelters – hangs in City Hall, in the old railroad depot. So do mock-ups of a revitalized Main Street.
And on that Main Street, construction crews are working on the foundation of a new office building, one that will house a medical billing company.
“If it weren’t for those two deaths, I can’t help but think it didn’t help,” said Ken Anderson, whose business, K-K Saddle Pad Co., occupies the former newspaper office on Main Street.
Anderson has been in Holly for three generations, and he remembers the good old days. Three grocery stores. Two dry cleaners. Two car dealerships. Two barbershops. A Main Street where, on a Saturday night, “You couldn’t hardly find a place to park.”
Rebuilding the town
He said he believes Holly may be on the cusp of a rebirth.
At the same time, it’s clear that psychological scars remain a year after the twister hit.
“Most people are doing well,” said Cathcart, the bank president. “Some I can still see the pain on their faces.”
A few families left town. A few homes won’t be rebuilt.
Thirteen trailers provided by the federal government remain – 10 in town, three outside Holly – and several are still occupied by families who haven’t gotten as far as rebuilding.
Even Town Administrator Marsha Willhite, who is juggling a variety of projects aimed at rebuilding and revitalizing Holly, experiences moments of distress when she thinks about the tornado and what it wrought.
“I call it meltdown, and I have them,” Willhite said.
“I try for it to be behind this closed door and not in public.”
There is the controversy over what to do with First Baptist Church, a mainstay on U.S. 50 since the 1920s that looks to be intact but was condemned after engineers concluded the tornado rendered it structurally unsound.
The question of whether to repair the building or knock it down and build a new church has divided the congregation.
At a recent meeting, the church’s leaders decided to demolish and start over.
“Sometimes you have to move on,” said the Rev. Ralph Plummer, who has been at First Baptist for 20 years. “This might be the time.”
On the other side is Ruth Wardlow, 85. A lifelong member, she refuses to go to the funeral chapel where First Baptist’s services are being held temporarily – she says she figures she’ll be there soon enough. She lives across the street from First Baptist, can see the orange “condemned” sign stapled to the plywood covering what used to be the front door. And she can’t stand the thought that it might be razed.
“That just makes me sick,” she said.
Coming together
But there is also a story of togetherness in Holly.
It’s happening every Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the Holly Theater, an art deco moviehouse on Main Street that has become the community’s self-help center. The city owns the building, and the volunteer group, Holly Pride, operates the theater, where tickets are $4 and a decent-sized popcorn and a big Coke will set a patron back $2.
And the town has adopted supporting the theater as a way to help Holly, flocking to not-quite-first-run family-friendly movies—last week was The Bucket List and this week is Juno—as a way to promote a sense of community and pump new life into the struggling burg.
Already, Holly Pride has invested profits from the theater in other projects, including a youth center.
Some nights its 199 seats are nearly all filled. Some nights, 40 or 50 people come out.
The show goes on. Just as life goes on in Holly, a year after a tornado shook this town to its core.
