Late on the night of March 31, Adrian Smith was at his DuPuy Street home on the east side of Hopkinsville when the storm hit. It carried straight-line winds of 80 to 90 mph.
“I was sitting in the bedroom when the lights went out. And then I heard the tree hit my house,” Smith recalled.
Tree trunks, limbs and building debris were scattered all over the neighborhood, and no one in his family could get through to check on him. When someone from the sheriff’s department arrived to make sure he was OK, Smith had been outside to check the damage. He used a light on his cell phone and saw he had lost two big walnut trees and two maples.
One tree was leaning on the roof of a room Smith had added to the back of his house about 15 years ago. He’s lived there for 37 years. The house sits across the street from Rutland’s Barbecue. He can see the Vine Street cemetery flag pole from his front lawn.
Smith, 65, doesn’t want to leave his home. He grew up in the neighborhood. But he wasn’t sure how he would get the trees off his house and out of his yard.
A contractor estimated the work would cost between $2,000 and $4,000. He couldn’t afford to pay that. Smith said he became disabled at age 55. He had worked at Phelps Dodge for about 20 years and then at Walmart for 15 years. When he left his last job, he needed joint replacement surgery for one knee and both hips.
Help for the storm damage finally came on Wednesday. A crew from Kentucky Baptist Convention’s Disaster Relief arrived to saw, lift and stack the trees. They also pulled the tree from his roof.
There’s still one tree that has damaged limbs hanging over a storage shed. The volunteers said they didn’t have the right equipment for that task. And his roof will need more repairs. But Smith said he couldn’t thank the volunteers enough for the work they did.
“They were really good people,” he told Hoptown Chronicle.
The team that worked on Smith’s property is part of a group of approximately 35 Baptist volunteers who are helping about 20 people in Hopkinsville this week. Most are older and own their homes in the inner-city.
Ward 1 Councilwoman Natasha Francis said the effort grew out of Gov. Andy Beshear’s visit on April 7 to view the storm damage in Hopkinsville. Francis was put in contact with Bill Eckler, the volunteer organization coordinator for Kentucky Emergency Management, and he helped bring the Baptist Disaster Relief volunteers to town.
Eckler said that following the governor’s visit to Hopkinsville, Francis and Christian County Emergency Manager Randy Graham identified local residents who needed assistance with storm cleanup.
The volunteers have come from several different communities in Kentucky. They are staying at Concord Baptist Church, sleeping on cots and cooking meals in the fellowship hall. Some of them have worked in several disaster recovery efforts, including Mayfield following the 2021 tornado outbreak and Whitesburg after the 2022 flooding.
Carrie Joy Brookshire, of Trenton, has been a Baptist Disaster Relief volunteer for about a decade. On this trip, she is part of the cooking team. At other recovery sites — including Florida after Hurricane Ian and Waverly, Tennessee, following flooding — she helped run shower and laundry facilities.
“For all of us, it’s just a calling and desire to truly want to help people in their toughest times and do it with a smile,” said Brookshire.
The work they do is an expression of Jesus’ love, she said. The volunteers feel like family. They are close, even though she may never see some of them again.
Preparation for the breakfast starts shortly after they get up at 5:30 a.m. Everyone eats together around 7 a.m., then chainsaw teams take their lunch with them and they all meet again at the end of the day for supper.
Another member of the cook team this week is Mildred Mabry, who retired in 2008 from Crofton Elementary School following 34 years in education.
Like Brookshire and Mabry, almost all of the disaster relief volunteers are retirees in their 60s or older. They go through training to learn how to run heavy equipment and chainsaws. Other skills, like Brookshire’s made-from-scratch biscuits, don’t have to be taught.
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John Franklin, who is director of missions for the Christian County Baptist Association, hopes the work being done this week will help jump-start a new disaster relief team based in this county.
“There was a ministry here that Tom Westerfield led,” he said. Westerfield had taken relief teams to help after tornadoes in Tennessee, hurricanes in Florida and earthquakes in Haiti, among many areas. But after his death in 2012 in a farming accident, the organization didn’t hold together as well as some had hoped.
The local Baptist association has 44 member churches, and Franklin believes they could revive a team that would tackle the kind of work being done this week in Hopkinsville. Anyone interested in learning more can contact Franklin at 270-885-8777.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
