2019 Memorial Day tornadoes: Beavercreek couple determined to rebuild

BEAVERCREEK — Charlotte and Jim Lynch vividly remember the night the tornadoes rolled through the Miami Valley on Memorial Day, 2019.

Jim had gone to bed early.

“Charlotte came running into the bedroom and told me to get dressed because there’s a tornado coming,” Jim Lynch said.

Charlotte picks up the story from there…”and I looked at Jim and said ‘I love you’ because I just felt like we were going to be blown away.”

With no basement to run to for cover, they sat in their bathroom with their bike helmets on and heard the roof of the house being lift from the walls around them.

“We listened to our roof, all the way across the home, all of the nails being ripped out, Yes it did sound like a train,” Charlotte Lynch said.

When the storm passed their house was still standing, but was structurally unsound. It had to be demolished and the couple waited through many months of on-again, off-again construction.

Now it is on-again and showing signs of progress. A new foundation is going in.

Every time they return to check on the house, neighbors stop by to say how glad they are that the couple is rebuilding. Neighbor Lisa Fleming stopped her car on the street to say “hello” Monday morning.

“We need everybody to come back. We need our neighbors to come back and be family again. This is the last of what I can see of the tornado and as soon as it’s up and back, its all behind us and just a memory,” Fleming said.

Charlotte says her memory of a tornado decades ago has helped her deal with this disaster. She was a senior in high school when the 1974 tornado hit Xenia. “I knew what the aftermath ( of the 2019 tornado ) was going to be like. I knew how challenging it was going to be. I have great empathy for the senior class. That was my senior year. We called our seniors the “Roar of ‘74” and kept going,” Charlotte Lynch said.

With construction of their new house now underway they are hoping good construction weather will follow. If the project stays on schedule they hope to be in their new home by Halloween or Thanksgiving at the very latest

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