‘I'm going to treat it like a celebration’: One year after tornado, some are rebuilding while others moved away

A year ago, Abby Magers was sheltering with her students at Elkhorn South High School while an EF-4 tornado demolished her house.

She didn’t know how bad it would be, but she watched as the radar kept indicating rotation in her neighborhood, Ramblewood.

Once the students and teachers were released, she called her dad.

“My parents live four blocks just east of here, and I just asked ‘Do I still have a house?’ It was kind of half joking, like, ‘How's my house looking?'” Magers said. “And he goes, ‘No, you don't have a house anymore. It's gone.’”

Magers went to her parents’ place, and together, they walked to where she lived.

“There was nothing left. The houses were just flattened,” she said. “I remember stopping, and I grabbed onto my dad's arm, and I just had to pause for a second, gathered myself, and we walked down. It was a hole in the ground. The few items that were left of my belongings were just scattered about. It was one of the worst things I've ever seen in my entire life.”

That night, Magers, her parents and her sister grabbed what they could. Some irreplaceable items like a quilt her grandma made and a jewelry box with her grandpa’s Veteran of Foreign Wars belt buckle had managed to survive the destruction, but the majority of her belongings were gone or destroyed.

The tornado that impacted Elkhorn also hit Bennington and Blair, destroying and damaging homes in each city on April 26, 2024. It was the strongest of more than 30 tornadoes that touched down in Nebraska and Iowa that night with wind speeds as high as 170 mph, according to the National Weather Service in Omaha/Valley.

Ken Gruber was leading a video class with his wife at the independent living neighborhood where he lives in Elkhorn when he saw a tornado had touched down in Lincoln. That same storm later produced the tornado that hit communities farther east.

“Normally, the tornado doesn't pounce in your backyard like that all the time,” said Gruber, president and CEO of Omaha Rapid Response, a disaster relief organization. “Sometimes you have hours to respond or get a team together and to go, but it was right here in our backyard, and so we knew it was coming.”

Once it was safe, Gruber and his wife went to Ramblewood. When he got there, he saw neighbors trying to help each other. He used social media to get the word out about the damage done and the amount of work that would be needed to restore the neighborhood.

“We didn't have four or 500 show up. We had 3,000 show up the first day,” Gruber said. “We had 10,000 volunteers that first week.”

A year later, there’s still work to be done. Gruber said he still gets calls about trees needing to be cut down and families starting the rebuilding process. There are volunteer groups from Michigan, Wisconsin and Wyoming helping with recovery from the tornado along with other storms in the next few months.

“After the news media leaves, after the adrenaline drops out, then we want to be able to be there so they can count on us when the shock wears off and all of sudden they're left going, ‘Well, my life has totally changed, and I have to rebuild my house, or if I have to rebuild my family,’ or what is it that they need,” Gruber said. “They know that we're there for them.”

Two of the biggest challenges for families moving on from disasters is working through insurance and dealing with inspections, he said.

In some cases, insurance companies can take months to assess damage, stopping families from being able to clean up. Gruber said his relationship with several insurance companies helps move the process along because the companies see him as unbiased and he takes lots of photos and videos.

With inspections, multiple inspectors will come in to look at what’s safe and what isn’t. What the inspectors approve may vary, leading to confusion with what homeowners need to fix.

“There's some people that don't even know if they're going to rebuild and sometimes they sell their property as is, or they come four months later and go, ‘Okay, I think I do want to move back there,’” Gruber said. “Because they see the progress in some of the neighbors and go, ‘Wow, they're building back, and those are, these are really nice houses,’ and so they go, ‘I think I want to come back to the neighborhood.’ So it's a process for them.”

Magers said it seems like half of the Ramblewood neighborhood decided to stay and rebuild while the other half decided to move on. She said she’ll miss her next-door neighbor, who decided to leave the neighborhood.

One year after the storm, Magers’ house is a couple months away from being finished. Initially, she stayed at her parent’s house, but now she’s been living in a nearby apartment complex.

Magers said she had always wanted to build a house but wasn’t expecting to be thrown into it the way she was.

“I think the hardest part was just kind of getting myself excited about the whole process, because it was like, I don't want to be picking out paint colors,” Magers said. “I don't want to be doing this. I just want my house back. But as it went on, the last few months has been actually pretty fun.”

She hopes some young families will move into the houses that were left behind. Magers said she’s been thinking about the one-year anniversary of the day that changed her life.

“I'm not going to dwell on it and be sad on that day,” she said. “I'm going to treat it like a celebration. I've made it a year, and it doesn't feel like it's been a year at all. It feels like it was yesterday, honestly.”

Magers teaches English classes at Elkhorn South High School. She said she is thankful for how supportive both her school community and the Elkhorn community have been over the past year.

Magers recalled thousands of people showing up to help her and her neighbors clean up. She got teary-eyed talking about students’ support, including writing sticky notes saying how much they loved her and buying some of her favorite books to restart her collection. One student even started a GoFundMe for Magers and another teacher.

“The Elkhorn community is so special,” Magers said. “We're not a small town anymore, but it still feels like a small town. I truly had never felt so loved by literally everybody in my life — students, friends, family, co-workers, everybody. It was really special.”