Burying their dead and still digging out

“They say we have a another storm coming,” says Brittany Ginn, after attending the funeral of her aunt, uncle, and cousin on Saturday morning near Nixville in Hampton County, South Carolina, “I’m terrified. I don’t know where I’m gonna be, but I’m not gonna be out here.”

Brittany Ginn, center, in her parents’ front yard following a funeral at a nearby family cemetery plot.

Standing in her parents front yard, there is devastation caused by Monday morning’s EF-3 tornado in every direction. About two hundred yards to the south the funeral service on the family plot finishes up as folks walk across the wrecked landscape, returning to their cars and homes — or what’s left of them.

About a hundred yards to the west, a grey porch is all that remains from the trailer home where Donna and Jim Breland, and daughter Kayla Breland, 26, lived. Their bodies were found Monday morning a couple hundred yards away, near their final resting spot at the family cemetery.

“Everybody on Ginn Hill [Dr.], on down the road, is pretty much our family. It's like a little circle of family, but after the storm, it's not gonna be the same at all.” says Ginn.

Just after the funeral crowd disperses, Dennis Smith arrives to his home across the street. It’s the home where his mother was raised. The metal roof has a large jagged hole, the result of a fallen tree. A tree also fell on the house next door, where Smith’s mother and brother now live.

Dennis Smith sorts through valuables in his bedroom on Saturday afternoon.

“We just tried to steer clear of it this morning,” Smith says of the funeral he describes as limited to immediate family only, “so we're just getting here.” The Brelands were family but he wanted to avoid the congestion.

Smith and his wife were at her house in Varnville on Monday morning when the tornado tore through the neighborhood. “We split time with each house,” says Smith, who served in Afghanistan from 2007-2008. Five days later, now that the tree is off the house he feels safer about entering to retrieve valuables.

People work to repair the neighborhood across from Dennis Smith’s home along Turner Expressway near Nixville, South Carolina.

“I'm gonna try and save some of this stuff if possible but I don't know,” he says, referring to many of the family antiques. “Until the adjuster comes I don't know what to do. I don't know whether to try and take it out or leave it? I just don't know where to go at this point."

High on his list of items to retrieve today are his military awards and a hat signed by Garth Brooks, Charlie Daniels, and Willie Nelson, both of which are located on the side of the master bedroom most damaged by the storm. To get to them, Smith navigates across a pile of debris, pushes a piece of the metal roof out of the bedroom and twists a piece of lumber in two. Eventually, he finds them. Both appear to have survived the elements.

Dennis’ brother secures a tarp at their mother’s residence.

Severe storms are expected to hit the state again today and tomorrow as the rural community contends with recovery from a tornado, amid a pandemic in the state now reporting more than 4,000 positive cases of COVID-19 and more than 100 deaths attributed to the novel Coronavirus.