Thursday, May 06, 1999

Family finds home taken by tornado

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Return from vacation painful

BY MARIE McCAIN
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Gopalakrish and Aruna Sivakumar - just back from India - look through belongings salvaged by friends. (Tony Jones photo) | ZOOM |

        SYMMES TOWNSHIP — Returning to their Symmes Township apartment this week after a monthlong trip to India, the Sivakumars found Wednesday that much of what they own can fit neatly into a 10-by-15-foot space.

        Victims of the April 9 tornado, they had received several e-mails from a friend describing the damage to their two-bedroom apartment and the surrounding area, but they weren't aware of exactly how much they had lost.

        On Wednesday, while sifting through boxes of belongings hastily packed by strangers, they struggled to make peace with the devastation many other victims have already accepted.

        “We didn't have (renter's) insurance,” said Gopalakrish Sivakumar, who works as a data management consultant for Structural Dynamics Research Corp. (SDRC) in Mil ford.

        Mr. Sivakumar, 35, estimated he and his wife, Aruna, 28, and their 5-year-old son, Gautham, lost at least $25,000 in belongings.

        Their only insured possession, a maroon-colored Toyota Corolla, sat undamaged in the parking lot in the same spot it had been in when they left on their trip March 28.

        The Sivakumars had lived in Valley Brooke Apartments for only a short time when they left to visit family in the southern India city of Madras.

        The family moved to the Cincinnati area from Detroit in October after Mr. Sivakumar took a job with SDRC.

        Though brief, five months was enough time for Mrs. Sivakumar to make friends with Lisa Hall, a consultant with Creative Memories, an agency that teaches people to design their own creative scrapbooks.

        When the tornado struck, Mrs. Hall, who lives near the Sivakumars' Red Cloud Court apartment complex, thought of her new friends.

        And after learning they were out of the country, she set about helping.

        “I've always been so appreciative that I've grown up here and have a wonderful support network,” Mrs. Hall said Wednesday. “I kept thinking of Aruna and how it must feel to be in another country and that she might not have anybody to support her.”

        “I just felt like she needed somebody. She's always been very kind to me. I knew she was a sweet person, and I just thought she and her family would need help.”

        By the time the Sivakumars arrived home Tuesday, Mrs. Hall had managed to secure the family a new apartment and to get three car-loads of their belongings transferred to her home.

        Other friends from Mr. Sivakumar's job also offered help.

        But by that time many of the salvageable items from the apartment's living room and kitchen had been packed and moved into a 29,000-square-foot storage facility in Union Township by movers with Planes Incorporated, which donated the space and moving assistance to tornado victims.

        The Sivakumars were not allowed inside their apartment Wednesday because much of the complex has been condemned.

        Management officials were worried more walls would collapse onto the already unstable flooring and injure some one.

        In the Sivakumar apartment, a portion of one wall was blown out and a wall that separated the two bedrooms collapsed, while wood, concrete blocks and other debris from the ceiling fell onto the bed in Mr. and Mrs. Sivakumar's room.

        While standing outside their apartment Wednesday, the Sivakumars talked briefly with a downstairs neighbor who had come to see about his apartment. They learned another neighbor was slightly injured by de bris that fell in his bedroom.

        “People keep saying it was good we were not there,” Mr. Sivakumar said. “We might well have been hurt, too.”

        The Sivakumars spent much of Wednesday trying to track down the college diplomas that they kept in their bedroom.

        But by the afternoon, after nearly three hours of searching through boxes outside the apartment, they began to accept that the documents had most likely blown away in winds that exceeded 200 mph.

        The couple also realized they would have to start over from scratch.

        “When I came here 3¹/₂ years ago, I had nothing. I just sat in an empty house,” Mr. Sivakumar said.

        Mrs. Sivakumar could only smile weakly, resisting the urge to cry.

        “From now on if we live in an apartment, we are only living on the first floor,” she said firmly.

        “And we'll have (renter's) insurance,” Mr. Sivakumar added.

TORNADO COVERAGE

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