Video: Louisville Educator Remembers Last April’s Tornadoes

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LOUISVILLE, Miss. (WCBI) -A year after the April 28th tornado, we continue to hear stories of heroes. brave men and women who, despite their own loss, put their needs aside to help others.Shannon Smith from Louisville is one of those people.

The assistant principal at Eiland Middle School is also a bus driver for the school district. Even before she was able to check on her home after, she got permission to use school buses to help transport patients from the badly damaged nursing home to a safe place.

Here’s her story in pictures…and in her own words.

“It was almost instantly that someone said the nursing home had been hit and that we had to find a way to get the patients out. And I quickly called our superintendent Mr. McMullen and asked him if we could go get some buses. And I think he said yes.
We got a busload of patients and transported them back to our church and they unloaded them and they began bringing in mattresses and they set up their care center there in our church.
I didn’t go back to my house. We were there at daybreak the next morning. Charlie and I laid in the bed all night and we didn’t go to sleep. We just laid there. And I prepared myself for you know, probably for the worst. And it was.
The next morning we got up and were there waiting for the sun to rise. And It was probably the most beautiful day I’d ever seen. Blue clouds. The sun was shining. It just looked like a war zone.
Finally after about a week we had worked to salvage things
And we had some friends who came in and they said they would push our house down and push it to the road.
And so Charlie and I went back over there by ourselves probably the last time and we just looked at it. And we knew in our hearts that we couldn’t save anything else.
It was very similar to a funeral. We watched them push it to the road.
Just watching our little town, my hometown, our community here gather and the people who have come in that we didn’t even know helped us.
I just know that God has a plan for us. And I want to follow though on the plan that He has for us.”