COLUMBUS, Ohio — The tornado that ripped through Mayfield had barely any time to dissipate before she was on her way.
“We got in a vehicle and headed to town,” Devry Hughes said.
Hughes lives next door to Mayfield in Kentucky’s Calloway County. Luckily, she says her home was spared. She and her fiancé were one of the first volunteers to arrive in Mayfield.
“We got there [and] it was mass destruction [and] utter chaos,” she said. “It looked like you took a snow glob, shook it up and dumped all the pieces back on top of everybody.”
In a Zoom interview, Monday, at the mercy of a low bandwidth connection due to poor cellular service in the area following Friday’s storm, Hughes explains how volunteers, seeing the mass destruction, went to work by moving beams, cinder blocks and debris while trying to get people out.
“You could see hands, you could hear people screaming for help and then once we’d see hands [and] we’d hear cries for help, we would start digging,” she said.
Hughes, who has family in Reynoldsburg, posted a picture to Facebook early Saturday morning; a sobering image of what crews were up against. In two days, the post has been shared more than 3,000 times.
“They need everything,” she said. “I mean this whole town is gone.”
Hughes estimates 500 volunteers have been on the ground during the storm’s aftermath.
“There is so much hate in the world,” she said. “Whenever you can have so many people come together in tragedy and have so much empathy for a stranger I think that that is an amazing gesture.”