Susan Griffith can’t remember a tornado ever hitting Uniontown.

While the Fayette County Emergency Management public information officer said there might have been a similar disaster way back in the 1950s, the one that touched down two weeks ago is far from ordinary.

Thursday, Feb. 15, an EF-1 Tornado, with wind gusts of up to 105 mph, damaged 218 residential homes and businesses on North Gallatin avenue. 22 buildings were destroyed and 114 needed cleanup work done.

According to Griffith, since part of Uniontown is a “depressed area,” it isn’t easy for those affected by disaster to go elsewhere.

“A lot of those structures are rentals,” Griffith said. “So, you have people that are already somewhat in dire financial straits that don’t have the personal resources to relocate or to move into another structure.”

Griffith also said that a reason residents stay put is because they don’t want to abandon what is familiar to them. Getting people to move into a safer environment isn’t an easy task.

“Some of them just simply won’t leave,” Griffith said. “That’s their home, and that’s what they know. So, [there is] some difficulty just getting the people to new homes and getting them acclimated and getting another place to live and to reestablish [their lives]. It’s difficult. Some people have lost their living.”

According to Greg Crossley, emergency management coordinator and Volunteer Organizations Active in Disaster (VOAD) chair, emergency services is identifying what the victims need and getting them the resources necessary for what they need assisting with.

“We’re into the recovery, trying to identify people’s needs, what they are, where exactly they are, and then [matching] them up with available resources,” Crossley said. “Whether there are agencies that can help them [or] volunteer groups, there are a lot of faith-based groups that are involved in the VOAD. We’re into that process now.”

To help with the recovery, a Multi-Agency Resource Center [MARC] opened this past Monday and Tuesday. The center featured tables for each agency involved in the cleanup.

The recovery process for any disaster is a long one. According to Crossley, work is still being done to clean up the flood that took place in Connellsville back in the summer of 2016. Crossley said that a difference between this disaster and a more common flooding situation is that a tornado’s impact isn’t as far-reaching and that fixing the damage caused by a tornado is manageable.

“Flooding is what we’re used to,” Crossley said. “Just about everybody is affected and needs help. [When] a tornado hits, first of all, not everybody gets affected because of the nature of that type of thing. Then the other thing is that some people have insurance, they get repairs made, [and] they don’t have any needs that they can’t handle.”

Although the tornado is unlike anything that’s happened in Uniontown in recent memory, for Crossley, every disaster needs handled the same way regardless of rarity.

“Disasters are disasters,” Crossley said. “Our needs in the emergency management community, as far as providing for planning, are pretty much the same. Whether it’s a terrorist attack, a natural disaster or a [human]-made disaster of some sort, you still have the same concerns. The mechanism of the disaster really doesn’t make that much [of a] difference in terms of how we respond, especially in the recovery.”