HENRYVILLE — Residents in this storm-tossed town are eager to start rebuilding, but putting their homes and businesses back in place won’t be easy.
In addition to the massive amounts of debris that still needs to be removed, there are some regulatory hurdles that need to be jumped.
Among them: Many of the structures in the area hardest hit are in flood-prone areas where building is severely restricted or prohibited by state or federal law. That means some homes and some businesses destroyed or heavily damaged by the tornadoes that struck Friday likely won’t be rebuilt on the same spot.
County officials, meanwhile, say that while they’ll help expedite the rebuilding process, they won’t take shortcuts on building code standards that they’ll later regret.
“You can only hurry so much,” said Ramona Bagshaw, executive director of the Clark County Plan Commission. “We don’t want a house to burn down from faulty wiring because we thought we were trying to be good to someone.”
There’s been an outpouring of offers from volunteers to supply the labor and material to rebuild homes of the estimated 40 percent of Henryville residents whose houses weren’t insured. An estimated 200 homes in the town of 1,900 people were destroyed; there’s no count yet on homes damaged but still inhabitable.
Henryville Community Church has already received enough donations to build 20 homes and the Rev. Rich Cheek wants to get started as soon as next week.
“We have teams of people standing by, ready to start building,” said Cheek, the church’s senior pastor. “We’re in this for the long haul.”
Bagshaw is eager to see the recovery, too. For her, it’s personal. She’s a longtime Henryville resident whose home was damaged in the storm. Her daughter-in-law and grandson also live in Henryville. Her grandson rode out the storm huddled under a desk in the principal’s office at Henryville Elementary School along with other students and teachers.
Bagshaw said she knows people are eager to get their town back in order, and themselves back into their homes.
But she wants to make sure repair and rebuilding work that’s done is done correctly.
“We don’t need houses put up quickly that will fall down later,” Bagshaw said. “I love Henryville. I want it to be here forever.”
Clark County Surveyor David Blankenbeker said state and federal regulations will make it difficult — but not impossible — to rebuild homes and businesses in the flood-prone areas in Henryville. Many of the damaged structures along two creeks that run through town were built there before 1981, when federal emergency disaster standards for rebuilding were put into place.
The cost of building to meet those standards now may be prohibitive, especially for those who are uninsured. After the small Clark County town of Utica was flooded in 1997, some homeowners who chose to rebuild there had to elevate their homes 12 to 14 feet above ground. They built them on top of retaining walls or on frameworks that make the houses look like they’re sitting on stilts.
But Utica also saw some growth after the flood because it had to strengthen its building, planning and zoning laws in order to get assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Henryville is hoping to get FEMA assistance, both for homeowners to rebuild their destroyed houses, and for the town to repair and rebuild its infrastructure. Local, state and federal officials have been documenting the damage to the town and other communities hit by the tornadoes.
County and state officials intentionally left much of the debris from the storm in place in Henryville until FEMA officials had visited. They didn’t want the removal of fallen trees and fallen homes to negatively affect the amount of federal assistance that may be coming Henryville’s way.
On Tuesday afternoon, after FEMA officials had visited the town, a busload of inmates from the Henryville Correctional Center arrived in town to assist in the massive debris cleanup.
There’s an estimated 1 million cubic yards of “green debris” — downed trees and fallen branches — in Clark County that needs to be removed, according to an assessment by emergency officials working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That doesn’t include the “construction debris” from all the homes and buildings torn apart.
Officially, Clark County is only responsible for debris on roads and public rights of way. County workers and those inmates helping to clean up Henryville aren’t supposed to go onto private property where much the debris is strewn. But volunteers from in and out of town have been allowed to carry or push debris onto the public rights of way where it can be picked up by county workers and the inmates.
Debris removal will still be a major undertaking. Debbie Fletcher of the Indiana Department of Homeland Security said it will be weeks before it’s all removed.
“It’s not a fast process,” Fletcher said of disaster recovery. “I know that’s hard for people to hear that. Everyone’s patience is wearing thin.”