Baton Rouge firefighters respond to tornadoes in St. Bernard Parish

ST. BERNARD PARISH, La. (WAFB) - People in St. Bernard Parish are dealing with the aftermath of a massive tornado that killed one person and left widespread damage survivors are trying to clean up.

Many say the community is strong, resilient, and always helps each other out. The same sounds echo across Arabi.

Jamie Hornberger runs the community center in St. Bernard Parish.

“Just stress cause first thing we do is we serve the community we have a lot of people who rely on us for food and essentials, and this happens and it kind of takes away that ability to help them, be able to assist them, in an urgent way,” Hornberger said.

While she’s trying to clean up, her neighbors need her more than ever.

“The community needs us, a lot of family members and community, we’re their main resource and we’re steady and they rely on us, so we need to come back and be there for them times 10 what we normally do,” she said.

Neighbors are in disbelief after that tornado ripped through the area Tuesday night.

RELATED STORIES

Tornado rips through New Orleans and its suburbs, killing 1

‘Always smiling;’ Neighbors recount moments before tornado victim’s house was destroyed

“You can see the equipment is still hanging on the roof, and that staircase used to go all the way to the second floor that way, and the second floor disappeared,” David Pagan said.

Pastor Pagan said even though his church is destroyed, the damage could have been worse.

“In the last hour, we decided not to do the service, and we didn’t expect anything like that happening, and I’m really hurt by what happened, but at the same time, I’m grateful nobody got hurt,” Pagan said.

Like everyone, he’s trying to salvage what he can and rebuild.

“Pray for one another in situations like this that’s the best thing to do, to be together and forget about what happened in the past and move try to look forward,” he said.

“St. Bernard is strong, we always come back, we’re resilient and we always look out for each other, and we’re very grateful to everyone who has come out, all the emergency response, I mean it’s overwhelming just how quickly people showed up to help us and we’re just very grateful for that,” Hornberger said.

Baton Rouge area firefighters helped with the cleanup.

RELATED STORIES

BRFD sends help to those impacted by tornado in New Orleans

Drone video captures extent of tornado damage in St. Bernard Parish

Click here to report a typo.

Copyright 2022 WAFB. All rights reserved.