Scott Farley didn’t think much about the long view of what was happening to him in the final minutes of Easter 2020. He was too busy making sure his wife Susan and their daughters Caroline and Catherine were safely inside the windowless half-bathroom of the Autumn Chase subdivision house they’d called home for 18 years before a monster EF-3 tornado arrived that night to rip it to shreds.
“But every day since then I’ve thought, ‘I’m just happy to be alive,'” he said from the family’s rental home Saturday.
The official one-year anniversary of the devastating tornado outbreak in the Tennessee Valley isn’t until April 12. That’s when seven tornadoes roared through the Chattanooga area on Easter between 8 p.m. and midnight to destroy billions of dollars worth of property and cut short 10 lives.
“I don’t get too caught up in dates,” said Tyner principal Gerald Harris, whose home of 13 years in the Drake Forest subdivision was severely damaged. “But what I’ll reflect on the rest of my life is how my family, so many friends and lots of neighbors didn’t get hurt. You can make adjustments in life, but you can’t replace lives. I thank the Lord every day for that.”
This is not to say there haven’t been obstacles along the way. Harris, like far too many of his East Brainerd neighbors, has struggled with insurance companies to get the funds needed to rebuild or relocate.