“The tornado come up the river this way. It jumped across from Pendleton County, Kentucky. It come up this way.”

Ralph Ollendick is driving me through the village of Moscow, or what’s left of it. It’s been a year since a tornado ripped his community apart.

“This house was pretty well beat up, they got it looking nice now,” Ollendick says. “Then you go down there, nothing was done to those houses. Tornado never even touched it. You turn the corner here, there was a house on the corner, it’s gone; this house here still hasn’t been repaired.”

Ollendick is a pastor by day and a truck driver at night. His Assemblies of God church suffered only minor damage. Most of the destruction occurred closer to the river.

“When the tornado hit we had 500 homes and we lost about half of those right off the bat,” Ollendick says. “And there were only 30 homes that people could actually live in at that point and the rest of them had to leave until they could get repairs so that they could inhabit it. Everybody was in shell shock. I mean, it was shocking.”

The tornado claimed one life when it tore through Moscow. Carol Forsee, a village councilwoman, died when her home was destroyed. People here are grateful that the loss of life wasn’t greater. But they still wonder about the tornado’s random destruction.

“There was one house on the river here which is gone, they had the table setting for supper, silverware and everything was all there but the house was gone,” says Ollendick. “The room itself was basically there but the shell of the room was taken; the furniture, the placemats and everything not touched. How do you explain that? We’ve got a God that’s so powerful, buddy.”

Q: And what is that really old house over there with the roof gone?

“That’s what they call the Spate House. That’s one of the oldest houses in Moscow and I don’t know whether they are going to restore it or not. That house was a beautiful house, I’m not kidding, just a gorgeous house. The one across the street is just about restored. Those were used on the Underground Railroad to bring slave across,” Ollendick said.

This past weekend the people who remain in Moscow got together at the local community center. Susan Jones is the village’s event coordinator.

“We made it a pot luck dinner,” Jones says. “And as you can see it turned out to be a great buffet board. And also somebody brought a cake dedicated to Moscow. They did it because spring’s coming; you know the newness of life.”

As photographs of a desolate Moscow flashed on a screen in the corner, Wanda Woodruff showed her own photos of the aftermath.

“It just split this house right in two, right there. They had to tear it down,” Woodruff says. “This house here was my niece and it took all of her windows out and all of her furniture went out the roof and all and they had to tear the house down because there was just a shell after the house was gone.”

Woodruff recalls that the tornado struck so quickly she did not have time to reach her storm shelter.

“When the tornado hit, I started praying, which I’m a Christian, and I started praying for the Lord to keep us safe,” Woodruff says.

Woodruff still marvels that a wooden cross landed upright in front of her home during the tornado.

Tim Suter is the mayor of Moscow. He says that while some homes have been rebuilt the landscape has been changed forever.

“The village is just three years from its bicentennial so we probably lost trees that were probably 200-plus years old. It’s just something you don’t replace. It’s just going to be a different place to live,” Suter said.

Mayor Suter said there’s some on-going frustration with recovery efforts.

“Most people are pretty upbeat. For most part the spirit’s good, confident we’ll recover; it’s just going to take some time,” Suter says.

Suter says come back a year from now, and Moscow will be better.

If it’s Wednesday at noon, you can expect to hear the tornado sirens. The sirens are tested each week to make sure they’ll work in the event of a real threat. They’ve sounded three times this year in Franklin County for real warnings and 42 times across the state.

Since 2007, the number of tornado warnings issued for Ohio has tripled. The reasons why are pretty simple: more severe weather and better technology.

But because we’re hearing the warnings more often experts admit they’re becoming less effective.

“The county is very large so I tend to go to a weather station first to find out where it is. So, seriously enough to check, but not seriously enough to dash to the basement,” Johanna McKenzie, of Columbus, said.

Rachel White, also of Columbus, said does not take tornado warnings very seriously, “Because most of the time it never amounts to anything…it seems like so many instances of like them going off and nothing happens. Like, there it goes again, another day.”

That ambivalence is even worse in Plains states which can experience hundreds of tornadoes a year. Meteorologists call it “car alarm” syndrome, where something is heard so often it becomes background noise.

A storm last spring provided a tragic illustration. Last May, a tornado warning was issued for Joplin, Missouri. As the tornado moved toward the city, it intensified to an EF 5, the most violent kind. Not everyone heeded the warning, and 160 people died.

To try to overcome complacency in Tornado Alley, the National Weather Service is trying out a new warning system in Kansas and Missouri.

“The intent is not to scare, but it is to inform,” Meteorologist Mike Hudson said.

Hudson is chief operations officer at the Kansas City National Weather Service. He read the most severe warning.

“This is a life threatening situation. You could be killed if not underground or in a tornado shelter. Complete destruction of entire neighborhoods is likely. Many well built homes and businesses will be completely swept from their foundations. Debris will block most roadways. Mass devastation is likely making the area unrecognizable to survivors.”

Hudson hopes the impact based warnings will help people relate to a storm’s potential.

Not all warnings will sound as intense as the one in this report. A catastrophic tornado warning will be reserved for Joplin-like tornadoes that have been confirmed on the ground. The other impact based warnings describe situations of significant building damage, uprooted trees or roads blocked by debris.
Columbus is not Tornado Alley. And the old warning system remains in place here.

About 70 percent of the time tornado warnings are false alarms. That’s because the current radars allow the National Weather Service to issue a tornado warning about 13 minutes before a tornado actually forms, if it ever does. Channel 4 Meteorologist Ben Gelber admits there’s a delicate balance between safety and crying wolf.

“There’s no guarantee a tornado will drop from the clouds, so you issue a warning to cover a wide area just because there’s that small chance, but a very real risk once rotation is established. Trouble is, the public has heard so many warnings that there’s a tendency to wait until something is dangerously close. And if you have a storm that’s moving at 40 or 50 mph that can be too late,” he said.

Gelber said the only answer to what he calls “crying wolf” warnings is a radar set to be at the weather service’s finger tips later this year. Gelber said the new technology will give meteorologists a 3-D look inside a thunderstorm where tornadoes form.

“The hope is that technology will reduce the number of warnings when nothing touches down. In other words, a forecaster will have a better since of a real risk of a rotation leading to a tornado,” Gelber said.

The National Weather Service could decide this fall if the new impact based warnings will be used everywhere.

Rachel White, who earlier said she does not heed tornado warnings, said an impact based warning might change her mind.

“Yeah, that would definitely make me take it more seriously.”

At the time, WOSU’S Mandie Trimble traveled to her home state to help with clean-up. Since returning, Trimble tells us she has organized a benefit to help victims who continue to dig through the rubble.

“Jammin’ for Bama,” a benefit concert for victims of tornadoes in Alabama is scheduled for Thursday night from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. at Woodlands Tavern at 1200 West Third Avenue. Among the bands appearing are Willie Phoenix, Josh Krajcik, Billy Zen and Throat Culture.

In stark contrast to Saturday night’s stormy weather that killed five people and destroyed or damaged 100 homes, the start of the week brings clear skies and comfortable temperatures to northwest Ohio.

Wood County Sheriff Mark Wasylyshyn said parts of Lake Township looks as if a large weed eater pulverized an eight mile section of the town.

Lake High School was demolished along with the local police and fire EMS building. Wasylyshyn said residents and business owners have begun digging through the rubble.

“We can rebuild schools. We can rebuild police stations. The difficulty is going to be the ones who lost their lives. And then secondly, to those who lost personal items that they’ll never be able to replace whether family heirlooms, photo albums. Those are the things people are trying to collect now to piece together heirlooms and things are still salvageable,” he said.

Officials estimate damage could exceed $100 million. State leaders are working to get see if the areas qualify to be declared a federal emergency.

That’s because in many areas of the county it had. The sirens sounded eight minutes after National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for Franklin county.

Franklin County emergency management says two houses under construction were leveled, four more have been ruled too dangerous to occupy and at least 15 need repair.

Damage and debris from the tornado were spread across several blocks of the Upper Albany West subdivision. Pieces of siding still hang from the limbs of trees; the trunks of some pine trees were snapped clean off by the winds. Homeowner Mary Lovejoy says she was napping just before 7 last night when the sounds of a tornado siren and what she thought was a train woke her up.

“And so I looked out my back door and it was a really loud train so I knew it was a tornado,” says Lovejoy. “So I grabbed my two little dogs and barely made it into the crawl space when it passed over. It was just shaking the entire house and it got even louder and I felt it pass over and through.”

Lovejoy and her dogs Checkers and Lucy were not injured. And neither were any neighbors. But the storm left holes in her roof; her back fence is missing, and her garage is damaged. Two homes nearby were leveled. County auditor Joe Testa who surveyed the area with a team of appraisers says people are entitled to reduced real estate taxes based on the amount of their losses.

“There are small things like gutters, downspouts, fences, siding, things like that,” Testa says. “But obviously some of the roofs are bad; some of them are blown out. Garages are missing entirely and some of these people won’t be able to move back into their houses. So some of them will have to be torn down.”

Mary Lovejoy says she’s only lived in her home since May. Now the exterior is speckled with mud and grass and a piece of someone else’s siding has punched a hole in hers. She says it will be months before life returns to normal.