For Jackie Haag, May 20, 2022 was supposed to be a happy day: her daughter Sarah's 13th birthday party.
Haag is the emergency dispatch director at the Michigan State Police post in Gaylord.
That Friday morning, she and her team had been watching the weather. Haag knew a bad storm was coming, just not how bad it would be. She made sure everyone was ready and left the station around 2 p.m.
Her husband, a firefighter and EMT, had the day off. He and Sarah insisted Jackie go pick up the guests and run some errands for the party before the storm started.
“I'm picking up my daughter’s friends, and we just got in the car, and my phone alerts go off — that crazy sound you hear whenever something comes through the National Weather Service,” she said.
With three girls in her backseat, driving through downtown, Haag calls her husband first. Over the phone she hears the EMT pager and police scanner go off in the background.
“We both kind of get silent as everything goes off, and we both listen, both me on the phone and my husband standing in the house,” she said. "We hear that a tornado had just hit Main Street. I was like, oh my god, it's here.”
Jackie’s husband is called to the fire hall immediately. He tells her daughter to stay in the basement until Jackie is back with her friends.
Meanwhile, Jackie is thinking about all the places she should be right now.
"We both listen, both me on the phone and my husband standing in the house. We hear that a tornado had just hit Main Street. I was like, oh my god, it's here.”
—Jackie Haag
It’s one thing to be caught in an emergency from the dispatch center. Now, Haag was living a disaster.
She said those few minutes driving home felt like hours.
“There's trees down and power lines and cars and things are sideways and all over,” Haag said. “I thought, it's already hit. What am I going to see when I get to the house? If this is what I'm looking at in front of me, what is my house gonna look like?”
At some point the fallen trees block her neighborhood so she and the girls in the back seat get out and run.
In the distance she sees the house, still standing.
“I run around to the front of the house, open up the front door. I'm yelling for my daughter,” she said. “I get to the basement stairs and I open up the door and there she is. And then… that feeling where you finally want to fall to your knees.”
Haag has worked in emergency response for over two decades. But this was the one time in her career she felt like she wasn’t where she needed to be – and that’s stuck with her for 12 long months.
And she’s not the only one.
A VIVID MEMORY
Many residents know exactly where they were the day of the tornado. It claimed two lives and damaged more than 200 homes and businesses.
Nottingham Forest, a mobile home park off of West Main Street was devastated by the harsh winds and flying debris.
Both fatalities happened there. Only 23 of the 74 homes in the community were livable in the aftermath.
Charles Mills and his wife used to live there. Their home was struck head on by the 150-mile-per-hour winds in the EF-3 tornado that day.
A year later, it’s still emotional.
“I was covered with drywall, framing, insulation, a little bit of everything,” Mills said.
He said his wife was hospitalized for her injuries and had to go into emergency surgery.
Thanks to the local Habitat for Humanity, they now live in a one-bedroom cabin that Charles said has been good for now. But his wife is still recovering from her injuries to this day.
"I'm having to do everything myself," he said. "It’s just bad."
COMMUNITY RESPONSE
In the days and weeks to follow, community resources sprang into action. Gaylord recovered from its physical damage surprisingly fast. Many shops have been reopened, homes repaired, trees replanted.
The Otsego Community Foundation and the local United Way have now pooled around $2 million to go toward recovery.
But much of the damage left over now involves things you can’t see right away.
“I think we can recover but we can't forget,” said Kim Akin, director of Otsego County United Way. “It's a crisis to me when a family can't eat. It's a crisis to me when people can't pay their heat bills or when their car's broken, they can't get to work. There's still a crisis."
She said the region was already dealing with high-profile issues when it came to housing, labor and economic recovery from the pandemic. She said all of those issues were made worse by the tornado.
The Otsego Community Foundation is still accepting donations for tornado relief that will be distributed to local nonprofits.
The displacement and financial situations of people like Mills, and the trauma still felt by people like Haag, are the types of things community leaders are focused on moving forward.
“'Gaylord Strong.' It's our motto, but we are still vulnerable,” Akin said. “I think we just need to be mindful. And I think that's why it's so important for this community to have a long term plan moving forward.”
