LOUISVILLE, Ky. — While remnants of Beryl rolled through parts of Kentucky and Indiana on Tuesday, people in west Louisville were still picking up from the EF-1 tornado that touched down the 4th of July.
LaShonda Petty has lived in the Parkland neighborhood her entire life. Her house was hit hard by the storms; the Petty's entire backyard used to be covered by a tree canopy and is now filled with broken branches and leaves.
"It's probably one of the scariest things I've ever witnessed in my life," Petty said. “My dad, he’s elderly and lives upstairs, we didn’t even have time to go up and get him and bring him down. It was that quick.”
Some progress has been made on Olive Street.
"LG&E came through and they started working immediately, they worked around the clock for days," Petty said. “The alley way was still blocked yesterday, I called 311 and they came out in like two hours."
But days later, the family is still picking up the pieces.
"We still don’t have WIFI or cable, and when you got kids that’s hard," she said.
LaShonda's daughter, Kai, stood next to her mom, nodding along and remembering when the tornado came through her neighborhood.
“I looked out that bathroom window and it was pitch black outside," Kai said. "I heard my mama scream, tornado, and I started running but I was also scared because my grandad was upstairs."
Down the street, right off Woodland Avenue, Tree Doctor owner Matt Schulten, was removing a 100 year old tree that was completely uprooted by the storms.
“It’s heavy work," he said. “We try to get to the really dangerous jobs first. Trees on houses, on cars, things like that, because people. You’ve got to take care of that first, prioritize.”
Schulten has been in the business for over 40 years. "I've seen some storms," he told WHAS11.
“If you cut a tree back and take the weight off of it, if it doesn’t get top heavy it’s not gonna uproot as easy. But a lot of times, there’s not much you can do," Schulten said. “Trees like this are all over the city, so you just deal with it when it happens.”
Dealing with it when it happens is what scares the Petty's a few blocks over.
“What makes me more scared is that tree that didn’t fall is the bigger trees, if they do fall, they’re gonna end up falling on our house," Kai said.
LaShonda said it scares them now to live by big trees when bad weather comes through.
While trees are chopped up and removed, and the Petty's continue to pick up the pieces of their home, they remain grateful for what is still standing.
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