Create The Change

Create The Change - Tornado Victim Relief

Thousands of people are suffering from the devastation caused by a string of Tornados that swept through the South. It will take people years to recover and rebuild. With your help we believe we can help restore their lives quicker.

Create the Change employs compassion and creativity to provide direct community based relief. We are already working directly with several other partners to have bottled water donated and shipped in to the victims and relief workers on the scene. But this is not enough. Our goal is to help the victims and their families who are suffering from the destruction of both their property and the loss of loved ones We need your help!

As of Thursday morning:

Thirty-one people were killed in Tennessee, 13 in Arkansas, seven in Kentucky and four in Alabama, emergency officials said. It was one of the 15 worst tornado death tolls since 1950, and the nation's deadliest barrage of tornadoes since May 31, 1985, when 76 people were killed in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

There were no comprehensive estimates yet on damages, but the tornadoes' paths left behind flattened treelines, shredded mobile homes, and flipped-over tractor-trailers and trucks. Concrete floors remained where homes, garages and carports once stood.

Survivor Stories

In the mostly rural area of Lafayette, there are no tornado sirens. Linville, the county mayor, said he did not think they would have made much difference because of the way the 23,000 residents are spread out.

"You don't really think it's going to hit you until you realize it's on top of you, then it's too late," he said.

Just outside town, Melissa Bryant watched as friends picked through the heavily damaged home where her 78-year-old mother Dorothy Collins survived in a bathroom.

"It's devastating and terrible," Bryant said. "But she's very lucky; she's alive."

Students took cover in dormitory bathrooms as the storms closed in on Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. More than 20 students at the Southern Baptist school were trapped behind wreckage and jammed doors after the dormitories came down around them.

With five minutes' warning from TV news reports, Nova and Ray Story huddled inside their home outside Lafayette and came out unscathed. But nearby, their uncle, Bill Clark, was injured in his toppled mobile home.

They put him in the bed of their pickup to take him to a hospital, and neighbors with chain saws tried to clear a path. What normally would have been a 30-minute drive to the hospital took well more than two hours because the roads were clogged with debris. Clark died on the way.

"He never had a chance," Nova Story said. "I looked him right in the eye and he died right there in front of me." knew, she said, "I was looking up at sky."

Although government and other relief efforts are underway, the help these people are going to require is massive. Every donation, every dollar counts.

Already the story is slowly starting to drop in significance in the news media. Very soon the real work of helping and rebuilding will begin without the cameras rolling. The road to recovery will be long, and especially critical for the victims and families that fall between the cracks. Even years after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina there are people and communities that are suffering with no substantial help and relief.

Let's not let that happen this time. Even the smallest donation can make a difference.

Baby a Sign of Hope

CASTALIAN SPRINGS, Tenn. (AP) - At first, rescuers thought it was a doll. Then it moved.

In a grassy pasture strewn with toys, splintered lumber and bricks tossed by the tornado's widespread wrath, 11-month old Kyson Stowell was lying face down in the mud, 150 yards from where his home once stood.

"It looked like a baby doll," said David Harmon, a firefighter who had already combed the field once looking for survivors. Then he checked for a pulse. "He was laying there motionless ... and he took a breath of air and started crying."

The field had already been combed once for survivors, and finding anyone alive seemed improbable. Hours after the storm, there was devastation everywhere: The body of the boy's mother was found in the same field, houses were wiped to concrete slabs and a brick post office was blown to bits. But except for a few scrapes, Kyson was fine.