TOLEDO, Ohio — Amid the stress of cleaning up after an EF-2 tornado caused swaths of damage in Point Place on Thursday, the community rewarded itself for its efforts Monday night with a concert.
From devastation to a celebration, people in Point Place are starting the week after the storm on a high note.
The concert was put on by the Point Place Business Association and was planned before the tornado hit the area.
President Tom Stagner said group leadership was worried it might not happen with power being out in most of the community, but Toledo Edison restored it in time.
After the chaos of the June 15 tornado and the continuation of clean-up efforts Monday, Point Place residents were ready to decompress with Toledo-based group The Ben DeLong Band.
The group's tunes helped take residents' minds off the fear felt and damage caused by the EF-2 tornado.
"Our home was not hurt, but we lost a lot of huge trees that went down," Point Place resident Rick Gibson said. "We were very, very fortunate."
Other residents, like Tome Miller, got even closer front-row seats to the tornado. Miller said he was in his car and watched the tornado form right in front of him.
"Normally it would take me three minutes to get home from that place, it took me like 40 minutes," he said. "Every street, all the trees were down. It was something else. And I was in that Palm Sunday tornado in 1965."
But despite everything that had happened to the Point Place community, 200 people enjoyed the concert at Friendship Park Monday night.
They relaxed with one another, the people who had been helping them pick up the pieces from Thursday.
"The neighbors all come to our house and helped us," Gibson said. "It's just amazing. I'm not one to sit down. I like getting involved."
With food in hand and the music flowing, they're now singing to a different tune.
"This is the best place, any place, Point Place," Stagner said. "If you live by that, these people all joined together."
As for those who still don't have power, a Toledo Edison spokesperson provided the following statement:
"We currently expect to have all customers back up and running by tomorrow evening.
Our crews have worked around the clock since Thursday evening — replacing more than 75 broken poles, restringing more than 10,000 feet of downed power lines and restoring power to more than 15,000 customers.
As we work through this stage of power restoration, there are dozens of isolated issues affecting individual or small numbers of customers. These are the most time-consuming repairs because they require our crews to go to each individual location to make the repairs. Many of the isolated issues include repairs to "service drops," which are wires attached to each home to deliver electricity from the neighborhood power line. These wires are often damaged by fallen trees and large branches."