But throughout all of these disasters, she relied on her faith to keep her going.

“For some reason I just trust that God had us,” she said.  “…I knew God had us.”

And then Hurricane Florence struck in September 2018. 

The storm destroyed her home and forced her to bounce to different shelters for months afterward. But eventually, women from the town of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, helped her buy a new house.

“They were angels that God placed in my life,” Geathers said.

When recovering from a natural disaster, many Americans, like Geathers, look to religion and faith to cope with the physical and emotional aftermath and integrate faith into their recovery process.

More than 75% of Americans affiliate themselves with a religion, and a majority of Americans consider religion to be “very important” to their lives, according to Pew Research Center. 

Jamie Aten, founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute in Wheaton, Illinois, has studied how faith affects both the short-term and long-term resiliency of communities.

“I’ve noticed that a lot of people turned to faith for meaning and as a way of understanding what they’re going through when disaster strikes,” Aten said.

In an open-ended survey asking Americans where they find meaning in life, 20% mentioned religion or spirituality in their answer, according to Pew Research Center. 

In fact, when Aten and his team surveyed survivors about where they turned to post-disaster for support, local religious groups ranked within the top five in both rural and urban communities.

“That’s a pretty important statistic to be aware of,” he said.

Research has shown that religion can be a coping mechanism and can assist people in adapting their lives after a highly stressful life event. 

While natural disasters can provoke intense stress and a feeling of helplessness, 

religion can provide an explanation for why they occur and how to move forward, said Katie Cherry, a psychology professor at Louisiana State University.

Research widely supports that survivors can experience post-traumatic stress following a natural disaster, Cherry said.

“Then the question becomes, ‘Well, does religiosity help it, or does it make it worse?’” Cherry said.

Aten said the greatest predictor of individual resiliency after a natural disaster is not how religious a person is but instead how a person utilizes his or her faith to manage the stress.

Even after significant losses, people who believe that God still loves them and will be there through that difficult time may struggle less psychologically than others who view God as punishing or judging them, Aten said. 

Even when enduring the same disaster, survivors can have different religious responses.

Hurricane Maria caused massive damage in both the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico in 2017.

Claudius Prosper, a resident of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, said he trusted in God even as all of his material possessions were damaged. 

“Even though everything was gone in the home, that would not be a problem for me because…since I have life, God would provide,” he said. “So that was it.”

Calila Figueroa, a 14-year-old resident of Loiza, Puerto Rico, struggled at first to come to terms with the hurricane’s destruction.

“Why would God let this happen to us?” Figueroa said. “This isn’t something anyone deserves. And I was angry and I was sad. But then I thought it’s just a natural disaster. And eventually we’re gonna get over it.”

Not only does one’s individual faith impact recovery but also faith communities play an essential role in getting people back on their feet.

Cherry found in her research that people who express and practice religion by themselves — and specifically without a community — were nine times more likely to experience post-traumatic stress disorder than others.

“When you still have that as a coping resource, people do tend to do better and that that may just be another manifestation of the positive effects of social support,” she said.

But if expectations for their communities and religious leaders go  unmet, it might push them through more grief.

“When you hold that really dear – when that institution does not come through for you on your worst day, it creates a disappointment that’s painful and horrible,” she said.

Pastor Jeffrey Brown, Jr. from Calvary Missionary Baptist Church in Dayton, Ohio, said after a tornado battered his community, he adjusted the worship service to focus on gratitude for surviving the storm.

“I told my congregation on Sunday (that) sometimes it takes a storm to pick us back up and let us know that, ‘Hey, we need actually need each other,’” Brown said.

Some churches are hit by disasters themselves.

When Superstorm Sandy overwhelmed Grace Bible Church along Oakwood Beach in Staten Island, New York, Rev. Richard DuPont said only three items survived: the DVD projector, the pulpit and the framed Bible verse, John 3:16.

This prevented the church from holding services for two weeks until DuPont offered up his house to the congregation.

Now, the church stands alone among empty lots after a majority homeowners took advantage of government buyouts. Grace Bible Church remained because the buyout deal did not offer them enough money. 

“I offered them the building if they would buy a piece of land, build a building equivalent to this and have movers move everything over for us,” DuPont said. “We haven’t heard from them again.”

As Geathers aims to build her new home in Mount Pleasant higher off the ground, she said she hopes she won’t have to ask for help from FEMA again, so other survivors can get the funds they need. 

“I trust and believe that God will work it out,” she said. “I’m doing what I can do, and what I can do right now is say it takes one day at a time and build one day at a time and do what I can do one day at a time.”

News21 reporters Allie Barton, Molly Duerig, Stacy Fernandez, Sophie Grosserode, Carly Henry, Harrison Mantas, Priscilla Malavet, Ellen O’Brien, Miguel Octavio, McKenzie Pavacich, Ariel Salk, Ben Sessoms, Natalie Wadas and Isaac Windes contributed to the report.

Justine Coleman

Justine Coleman is a recent graduate of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, with a major in journalism and mass communication and minors in psychology and religion. Coleman interned two semesters at NBC’s “Meet the Press.” She also worked at the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, assisting with The Washington Post’s coverage on unsolved murders, and on the Maryland and Virginia primaries. Coleman contributed to a front-page story for The Post on the deportation of the last living Nazi defendant in the U.S. She was assistant news editor at The Hatchet, GW’s independent student newspaper. Find more of her work here.

justinecoleman.weebly.com

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But six days later, the interior of his home went up in smoke due to what is believed to be an electrical fire, related to the tornado. 

His neighborhood was without power for close to a week. When it was restored on June 2, Schumacher wasn’t home. He was about 20 minutes away at a church in Kettering.

“Your house is on fire,” a former neighbor’s ex-husband called and told him.

It happened quickly, Schumacher said. At 5:15 p.m. power was restored to the block. By 5:30 p.m. fire trucks were outside his house. 

He forgot to punch off the breaker, he said.

After a power outage, before electricity is restored, heat-generating appliances like a stove, refrigerator, iron or hair dryer that were on at the time power was lost should be disconnected, according to electrical experts. When power is restored these appliances will turn back on and create a fire hazard if left unattended. 

Beavercreek Fire Marshal Randy Grogean told a local television station that after a power outage, residents also should turn off the main breaker to the homes.

Schumacher said: “In those days, I didn’t think even think about it.”

Grogean has advice for other homeowners: “If you have damage to your house, have an electrician check it before you re-energize the house. If you don’t think there’s any damage, just be very cautious of turning your power back on.”

Only shards are left around the perimeter of the front windows of Schumacher’s home, the entire floor is now a blackened terrain covered in hills of his blackened belongings and ashen debris. 

He had to put his job at Lowe’s on hold to rebuild his home, which his family has owned since the early 1950s. He’s staying at a Red Roof Inn in the meantime and then couch surfing with friends until he is able to move into an apartment. 

Schumacher’s neighbors helped him clear out the bunches of fallen trees a week later and he installed a white screen door he got for between  $10 to $15 on extreme resale at Lowe’s.

Stacy Fernandez

Stacy Fernández is a recent graduate of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University with dual degrees in magazine journalism and Latino-Latin American studies. She served as feature editor of The Daily Orange, Syracuse’s independent student newspaper. As an intern for The Buffalo News and The Dallas Morning News, she covered crime, developed enterprise stories, wrote longform features and waded through water to cover two flash floods and a double tornado. Fernández recently participated in NPR’s Next Generation Radio Project, a week-long “pop-up” digital journalism and audio training program. View her portfolio here.

stacyfernandez.com

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“It’s like a freight train,” said McCullough about the 2011 tornado that destroyed a third of the homes in Joplin, Missouri.

“This one had more of a grinding noise because of all the cars that were in there hitting one another.”

Glass cut his feet as he ran down from the second floor apartment. Within an hour of the tornado striking Joplin, McCullough began working with the Ozark Center, a nonprofit mental health center.

He did not stop for weeks. As a mobile crisis counselor, McCullough was used to providing mental health counseling after deadly events, but nothing on this scale.

Six minutes after the seventh deadliest tornado in the U.S. hit, St. John’s Regional Medical Center was on fire. In all, 161 people died. The disaster left over 1,150 injured. The tornado flattened 13 miles and destroyed 8,000 buildings.

McCullough and others at the Ozark Center realized their city of 50,000, didn’t have enough counseling help to handle the wave of people traumatized by the storm, leading them to train those without proper mental health backgrounds to provide emotional support to those who didn’t need clinical help, but someone to listen and provide emotional support.

The Ozark Center program, Healing Joplin, is now a national model used by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for how a smaller community can provide mental health services after a major disaster, said Vicky Mieseeler, chief administrative officer at the Ozark Center.  

Healing Joplin still operates, serving 195,000 people in the Joplin area over the last eight years. It has provided crisis counseling to over 21,000 people who said they had never sought mental health help before, according to the center.  

The mental health program also provided employment to 47 Joplin residents who lost jobs because of businesses destroyed by the storm.

“They were able to get a job and get back on their feet. But they were also helping others, which was incredibly important to many people in the community,” Mieseler said.

Before the tornado, Ozark Center crisis center received an average of 400 calls per month, but the year after the tornado the calls doubled each month. Even now, eight years after the storm, more people still are seeking counseling, some of them people who never would have thought of needing mental health help, McCullough said.

“Midwest culture is to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and take care of business,” McCullough said. “People were more worried about their neighbors than themselves, but when they really started thinking about it, they weren’t OK.”

McCullogh said the Ozark Center created Healing Joplin after reading studies that indicated people who survived 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina didn’t necessarily need clinical help, but did need someone to talk to in the following months and years.

“We’re further ahead than anybody would expect us to be at this stage,” McCullough said. “Joplin had an amazing response.”

Mieseler said that sometimes people would be busy for years before life slowed down and tornado victims realized they still needed help. A 2008 study “Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following disasters,” in Psychological Medicine showed post-disaster PTSD is still “substantial” after almost 30 years, especially in cases where there was a high death toll.

Ozark Center officials know members of their community still struggle with mental health issues. McCullough said some people still reference time based off the tornado, even eight years since it split the town in two.  

The center also helps people who didn’t realize for years that they were traumatized by the storm – until their busy lives showed down. The Ozark Center also welcomed researchers into their community, to measure the psychological impact of the storm.

While depression subsided after the storm, some residents later suffered post traumatic stress, according to one study.

Two and a half years after the tornado, Brian Houston, the director of the Disaster and Community Crisis Center at the University of Missouri, did a study finding that while the number of people who had depression symptoms decreased by about 8 percent, PTSD increased by about 14 percent. That would mean over a quarter of Joplin’s tornado survivors were likely battling PTSD at the time, according to his study.

“Immediately after a disaster, you’ll often see things like #JoplinStrong and that helps some people cope in the short-term,” Houston said. “But then with the challenges of rebuilding or recovering from an event, the realities settles in. People are going to face those realities and struggle.”

His study found those less educated and under the poverty line had a higher risk of PTSD. Nearly 18 percent of people in Joplin are under the poverty line. Only a quarter of Joplin residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

“The recovery time for the major events is not short and can take quite a bit of time,” Houston said.

For some, that recovery is still ongoing, even eight years later. Joshua Lockwood was 21 when the tornado hit his hometown. At first, he said he was fine, aside from a hard time sleeping, but that it was “about 2016” that he realized something was wrong and went to seek help. He wound up diagnosed with PTSD, depression and anxiety and said his anxiety symptoms prevent him from driving when it is raining.

“I still have those dreams every once in a while, but my dreams were getting more tornado-centric,” Lockwood said. “Coupled with it getting close to storm season, I realized I’m still kind of messed up.”

Lockwood’s struggle mirrors his community’s, which continues to this day and gets exacerbated when new tornadoes hit in or near Joplin. The most recent such tornado happened on the eight-year anniversary of the 2011 tornado, when tornadoes hit the nearby towns of Golden City and Carl Junction on May 22-23.

But McCullough and Healing Joplin were there to provide mental first aid for the communities in southwest Missouri, just as they were for Joplin when they were needed the most.

Sarah Beth Guevara

Sarah Beth Guevara is a senior at the University of Oklahoma where she is finishing a degree in journalism and a minor in vocal music. She currently serves as president of  the National Association of Hispanic Journalists at OU. She is also a Gaylord Ambassador. The bilingual journalist has interned with the Enid News and Eagle and News 9. She’s also written for OU Nightly, Gaylord News Oklahoma, Monkey Cage….and [UNFILTERED], a student media project with KWTV News 9. In the fall she will be a wire reporter for Gaylord News in Washington, D.C.

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