Redeemer Lutheran Church stood on South Highway 27 in Somerset for about 60 years. On the night of May 16, 2025, most of it was destroyed by an EF4 tornado.
The estimated cost to rebuild was $1.2 million, with the church’s insurance only covering a fraction of that.
“It was basically totaled except the fellowship hall,” said Sandy Schuldheisz, a local physician who serves as the church council’s president. “The backside was preserved. So fortunately, we saved the beams. All the pews were destroyed, but our building committee — a carpenter on there — took them to a barn and meticulously refurbished and restored them all.”
Schuldheisz said she found a builder who would do the church reconstruction below cost, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“I said, ‘You're not going to make any money,’” she recalled. “He said, ‘No, but I can lay my head down at night.’”
Every member of the congregation pitched in, even a woman who’s 105 years old.
“It’s beautiful, it's just spectacular,” Schuldheisz said. “And we have a lot of old members, you know, but everybody did something. I wanted to lead so that everybody felt that they had rebuilt the church.”
Not even a mile away, South Kentucky Rural Electric Cooperative is in the process of rebuilding its headquarters, which was also wiped out that night. About one-third of the RECC’s 75,000 customers in the region lost power after the tornado.
A dispatcher was working alone inside a reinforced part of the building. He was not injured, but the tornado flipped over his truck in the parking lot.
Communications administrator Morghan Blevins said it was a challenge to restore the company’s internal phone and internet service and bring power back to thousands of customers, as employees worked from the parking lot of the headquarters.
“We had to bring in porta-potties,” she said. “I was charging my laptop in my vehicle. … It was crazy how we had to work things. But just to be able to pull together and do what we did — I mean, in a week, have 27,000 people back on — it's just a testament to our team and their work.”
The tornado struck a commercial section of Somerset, narrowly missing two schools, a mall and a residential neighborhood. It killed one person that night in eastern Pulaski County and 17 people in Laurel County. An elderly Russell County resident died in the aftermath of the storm.
With wind speeds as high as 170 mph, the tornado carved a path through the Daniel Boone National Forest that was visible in drone footage taken afterward. It devastated a neighborhood in London, as well as the London-Corbin Airport.
In Somerset, the damage was limited to structures. A popular coffee shop took a direct hit, as did a gym. Blevins said debris from the gym, including steel beams, crashed into the South Kentucky RECC building, with gym mats and trophies scattered all over nearby properties.
It was hard to comprehend the magnitude of destruction, she said.
“It's pretty incredible, but here we are now,” Blevins said. “We've got our warehouse building back up and operational. We're hoping to be in our new headquarters before the end of the year. When you're in the business that we're in, it doesn't stop. You've got to find a way to make it work and keep on going.”
Back at Redeemer Lutheran Church, congregants held their first service in the rebuilt space on Easter Sunday.
Prior to that, they met at the chapel of Pulaski Funeral Home. Schuldheisz, the church council president, said her initial reaction was, “Oh, creepy, but OK.”
“They gave us a key,” she said. “They gave us the code to get in. They had donuts every Sunday, had coffee made for us. They're all saying they kind of miss it.”
There was an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at the church the night of the tornado, and the last people inside left around 10:30 p.m., just before it hit. Schuldheisz said God protected them.
This story was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU Public Radio in Kentucky, and NPR. Sign up for the weekly Porch Light newsletter here for news from around the region.
