03/27/2025
An update in an article from our Co-Executive Director Warren Tidwell:
Mattie Echols is in her mid-eighties and lives in Camp Hill, Alabama.
“Oh, you forget birthdays after a while,” she says when I ask an exact number. “85, 86, something like that.”
She lives alone and her roof is still covered in tarps months after a hailstorm destroyed it. She needs $9,000 to repair it but her insurance company refuses to pay more than $3,000.
“May as well have gotten nothin’. I’m retired on a fixed income,” she says with a sigh.
It’s not like Mattie’s neighbors can do much for her. Most roofs in the town received significant damage in the same storm. Nearly every car in town was a total loss. Numerous residents live in older homes without climate control and find it hard to insure those homes. Others live from week to week and can’t afford to insure the homes they own.
March 26th, 2025 was the 2-year anniversary of the hailstorm that destroyed 80 percent of the vehicles and severely damaged the roofs of most all of the homes in Camp Hill, Alabama, a place of 1000 residents where the majority live below the poverty line. The National Weather Service rated the size as “hen’s egg”, but a great deal of the town received baseball to softball sized hail, or 3 to 4 inches in diameter (7.5 to 10 centimeters).
The hail went through metal roofs, through the walls of modular homes, and destroyed deck ramps for senior citizens. It not only damaged roofs on some homes but also went all the way through to break ceilings internally along with furniture.
Roofers who came to town said they’d never witnessed hail damage so extensive.
However, even with all of the damage, we were denied a FEMA declaration. After doing 25 years of doing disaster recovery, I was shocked by this. Even with the tireless work of our local and state Emergency Management Agencies we were informed we didn’t receive enough damage to meet the monetary amount that would warrant assistance. That was a hard pill to swallow for the dozens of people in Camp Hill watching water pour into their homes the next time it rained.
A wealthier town would move on without a care. For a town like Camp Hill this was a particularly devastating disaster.
Only homes factor into the FEMA equation and, in a town where most only have automotive liability insurance, people were left with cars damaged so badly the doors couldn’t be opened and every piece of glass completely shattered. That, coupled with homes so badly damaged, has been debilitating to a number of residents. I’ve seen tornadoes do less damage to a town.
Mold grew rapidly in some homes.
Then, with the town still reeling, two weeks later the unthinkable happened.
At a Sweet 16 birthday in a neighboring town at a party filled with children from Camp Hill, two gunmen opened fire using g***k pistols with switches and extended magazines. Switches are a small augmentation that makes the pistols fully automatic. In an old bank building used to host events they haphazardly fired into the crowd. The dispute between a few attendees had nothing to do with the party but, within seconds kids lay dead and dying, many with injuries so severe their lives would be altered forever, and many from families affected by the storm.
How much pain can one town endure I remember thinking.
Our group of local leaders along with local volunteers, resolved to do whatever was needed to help the town recover. We wanted to more than recover, however. We wanted to address the systemic issues that meant a hailstorm couldn’t damage so much that we struggled to recover in the future. We wanted to address the issues that led young men of 16 and 17 years old to shoot bullets into a room full of strangers while going after someone else. We wanted to make sure that, as a community, we could come back stronger and more resilient. It was more than fixing roofs. We uncovered and worked on many other tangential issues related to the town.
We continued to survey the landscape to figure out what resources we needed to address the recovery and fill the gap with help since it was obvious that other help wasn’t coming.
The Alabama Center for Rural Organizing and Systemic Solutions (ACROSS) was formed as a result of all we needed to build and plan for a recovery for Camp Hill, Alabama.
I left my position as a Community Resilience Director at a different organization in order to found ACROSS, and then I recruited the best, brightest, and most experienced people I could from all over the world to build a plan and processes for community resilience, ones that we knew could be modeled and replicated by other isolated and under-resourced small towns.
Our board and staff are made up of people with expertise and from all walks of life, from a mechanic to a rocket scientist, to a retired coast guard officer who ran major disaster response operations post hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. The rest, I’d say most importantly, are regular, working-class folks from the towns where we operate from all walks of life.
In the months after the storm, using only $7800 in donations, we pulled in over a million dollars in material donations for Camp Hill, including 500,000 shelf stable meals, $50,000 in tarps to mitigate damage, along with organizing relief groups and churches to repair the damaged roofs, walls, and deck ramps that we could. With $750 and in-kind donations we repaired the electrical and plumbing systems in a century old house that now serves as The Oak Street Community Center and our base of operations.
In the days after the storm we learned that, even if we had secured federal emergency support, we had many residents with heir property issues. That is, they lived in homes and land they paid taxes on, but the title remained in a deceased parent or grandparents’ name. This meant they were ineligible for federal support, be it FEMA or USDA grants. Upon learning that, we recruited some of the top experts on heir property in the US. These individuals recently formed the Alabama Heir Property Alliance with Auburn University, Tuskegee University, Alabama A&M, and the Alabama Extension Service. They will be working in support of residents in need of heir property support.
In that same time, we also worked to address systemic issues through a project with local residents and Auburn University’s Masters in Community Planning department to build a three-stage community resilience plan for the future. It recently received an award at a regional planning conference.
A local resident helped us secure an automotive shop that had set vacant for years. We secured the needed equipment through donations from other shops and built a training program for formerly incarcerated workers and another for youth. We have built the connections we need to expand it and build a pre-apprenticeship program that will help get our young residents into trade apprenticeships and good paying jobs with benefits.
In the summer of 2024, after many months and many sleepless nights, we were turning a corner. We still, however, needed to repair many more homes. Many senior citizens who live alone were still in danger of losing their housing.
We knew fixing numerous roofs wouldn’t be easy, so we looked in many different directions for help. When we learned of a partner organization’s effort to go after what was known as an EPA Community Change Grant, we knew we had a perfect way to repair the dozens of roofs and walls through their community resilience plan the partner organization was looking to fund. It also matched perfectly with the long-term plans of ACROSS to help Camp Hill come back stronger than before.
We wrote a letter of support and were ecstatic to learn they had been awarded the grant that would not only fix the homes but also install solar and battery backup to operate our community center so that, if we were to lose power in a future disaster, we could refrigerate insulin for our people with medical needs, provide a climate controlled space for our medically fragile residents, and keep the food pantry refrigerators and freezers going at a crucial time.
The grant would also repair and upgrade hundreds of other homes in the communities in east Alabama around Camp Hill as well, bringing down utility bills for working folks in the small towns around us. Each town would also receive support upgrading a building with solar and battery backup. The same needs in Camp Hill can be found all along the Highway 50 corridor here. For small isolated rural towns with few to no resources it would be a true benefit to all residents.
Not only would we recover from the storm, but our entire region would be better off and more prepared for the next disaster. That has been the goal since the beginning of the recovery in Camp Hill. We would keep our most vulnerable residents from losing their homes and, like the goal of the grant, their homes would be more energy efficient which would save people like our seniors who struggle with utility bills some money. A town that had suffered through two terrible disasters would be well on their way to a full recovery. Our neighboring towns would be more resilient in the face of future disasters as well.
Then out of nowhere the EPA Grant was frozen through a memo issued by the Trump Administration.
For a moment before we celebrated as we had worked ceaselessly for nearly two years to find an answer to how we recover in Camp Hill. Then, like the night we learned our children of Camp Hill had died, we were knocked right back to our knees. Gutted doesn’t even begin to describe it.
All of the sleepless nights, the tireless work re-tarping roofs again and again, the tears that came from locals when they expressed their fear of losing their homes, and the countless times we assured them we were working on a solution were over. We worked within the systems together to secure a solution that would erase the memory of not receiving federal disaster assistance in the beginning. Then it was forcefully ripped away.
How much pain can a town endure?
We are a small organization that doesn’t keep a lot of funds on hand. Through most of this recovery we have gone month to month. This grant would have supplied enough funds for us to continue to operate at our efficient rate for the next six to eight months. More importantly it would have repaired every home for every family we are struggling to help.
We did everything the right way, honestly and ethically. We worked for nearly two years solid to get to this point.
Then everything was suddenly ripped away and thrown into limbo with the sweeping memo that froze all federal grant spending. Later the memo was rescinded but mixed messages from the White House did little to clarify the situation. Now the EPA grants have been suspended but no one can seem to give clear answers on when, or even if, this grant will go forward so that we can do the work we need to do and perform the repairs that are so desperately needed.
Confusion continues to swirl around the fallout.
It is clear this is going to continue being parsed out in our legal system. John Fishwick, a former US Attorney in the Western District of Virginia, said in an interview with News Nation recently that this will likely be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. If that is the case and the funding stays tied up waiting on a court decision it would have devastating effects across the country, especially in the areas with few to no resources like where we are in rural Alabama.
If not for the efforts individuals also working to help secure the resources we needed to repair homes, we would have ended up with more than a few homeless individuals. By the time we got to many of the cases there was black mold growing in parts of homes that had been blocked off by plastic wrap.
Numerous homes still have tarps on them to this day.
Those old feelings of hopelessness and desperation we thought were a distant memory are rapidly returned for everyone who has worked so hard over the past two years to secure the needed resources for the residents of Camp Hill.
I think often of Ms. Mattie Echols, a woman old enough to remember the most horrific days of Jim Crow and who lost her husband a couple of years ago. Her home is all she owns and, if it isn’t repaired soon, a woman in her eighties with no family left around her will be put out on the street. We will do all we can to keep that from happening, but I wonder what we will have to do to ensure other residents have the help they need if this grant is somehow blocked or clawed back by the federal government.
There are dozens of residents in Camp Hill in the same boat as Miss
Mattie.
I used to think I had a firm idea of what we needed to do but now wonder how solid the plans we make are. That is because we did everything the right way and now it means absolutely nothing if the Executive Branch of the United States is successful in their ongoing attempts to block or cancel these federal grants, including those awarded under the previous Presidential administration. It is a short-sighted move that harms the most vulnerable residents of our country and, if allowed to stand, will harm the people we have worked so hard to help since the storm and mass shooting.
As for ACROSS we are actively working for alternatives but, if we don’t find some other grants soon, we may have to close the doors. I don’t want that of course but we may have no other choice. Our work speaks for itself, but we run on a small, tight budget like so many other organizations. We were told this was coming this month and then yet again it was shut down by the Trump Administration. We planned our entire next two quarters around it.
As a result, this is a hit we may not survive.
Sadly, it means the same thing for those we are working to help in places like Camp Hill.
Post is public. If you feel inclined to help us you can do so here: https://www.acrossalabama.org/donate.html
Author’s Note Part: Sadly, I know a number of people will dismiss this as another place in Alabama getting what they voted for. Camp Hill is 90 percent African American and has suffered through what many others in the country are looking at coming their way for decades now. This is not a stronghold for the current administration. These are hardworking, honest folks who have been on an island down here with no investment in their community or their children or seniors for generations. This is a community where the municipal pool was filled with concrete after integration and where family homes were burned lest they fall into the hands of someone not like the previous owners. These are human beings who have dealt with the worst life can throw at someone and they—and we—need help.
https://youtu.be/oO0dpHG-Jp4
Auburn University class creates resiliency plan for Camp Hill to build for a better future after severe storms. The class focused its community resilience pl...
