HANCOCK COUNTY — Linda Kay was hanging out with friends enjoying an evening outside in Benton, Kentucky, about 20 minutes from her home in Murray, when a devastating tornado hit recently.

“We were 300 yards from where the tornado actually touched down here,” she said.

Kay, a Hancock County native and retired EMS first-responder, immediately went into work mode in the aftermath of the storm and was astonished by the devastation she was witnessing first-hand.

“We were just hanging outside watching the sky and we noticed how the weather was shifting and we could see the storm was going to come right through Benton, so we took shelter and we heard it coming through,” she said. “Just a few hundred yards from where we were, it was just total destruction.”

The tornado outbreak killed at least 88 people when a strong line of storms cut a path of devastation from Arkansas, where a nursing home was destroyed, to Illinois, where an Amazon distribution center was heavily damaged. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said at least 74 people in the state were dead.

Kay’s home, in nearby Murray, where Murray State University is located, missed the brunt of the force from the storm, which leveled broad swaths of Mayfield, Benton and other nearby communities in western Kentucky, some 200 miles from Hancock County.

“I’ve been helping out in Benton and Mayfield and I can tell you there is really no way to describe what I have seen,” she said.

Kay is a New Palestine High School graduate, class of 1997. She lived in Greenfield for 15 years before moving to Kentucky earlier this year with two of her children.

She was living in Hancock County when a tornado ripped through Pendleton in May 2019 and said the devastation she saw in Kentucky is far worse than what Pendleton suffered.

“I was one of the rescuers in Pendleton dealing with that aftermath, and I can tell you the destruction down here is even worse than what we saw in Pendleton,” Kay said.

A good friend of Kay’s, Bethany Tyler was born and raised in Mayfield, and said she took cover in a hallway of her home with a matress over herself, her four children and her brother when they heard the tornado approach.

“We were a little less than a mile away from where it struck,” Tyler said. “We heard what sounded like a train and could feel the house shaking, but that was it until it was over.”

Tyler fought back tears when she described the damage to her hometown of Mayfield, saying the hospital she was born in is gone.

“Our whole neighborhood is gone,” Tyler said. “Our hometown is gone.”

Kay, who still has relatives in Indiana, planned to return the area last weekend. While here, she was going to pick up supplies to take back to Kentucky to help the hundreds of families who are displaced and suffering.

Kay teamed up with the Sugar Creek Brickhouse restaurant, 5821 West U.S. 40, whose employees collected items from the community for Kay to take back on Sunday evening.

Kay, who said she knows how giving people are in Hancock County, noted people in Kentucky are in desperate need of bottled water, batteries, diapers, clothing and personal care items, among many other needs.

Kay’s daughter, Savannah Fitzgerald, who lives in Murray has been working with her to coordinate the donations. One of her other children, Lily Senne, who lives in Indianapolis and works at the New Palestine Pizza Hut, is working with her parents, Dewey and Karla Erwin, to help coordinate donations as well.

At least 30 tornadoes from Friday, Dec. 10 through Saturday, Dec. 11 struck Kentucky, Illinois, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas. One of the twisters that hit Kentucky is believed to have traveled 200 miles or more, possibly challenging the national record of 219 set in 1925.