Five years after the June 1, 2011, tornado flattened his business, David Bell admits he’s a little tired of people asking about how he’s handling the recovery.
Standing by the counter inside a donated trailer that has been his office for the last few years, Bell said people seem to get the impression that his business, One Stop Car Care and Classic Heaven, on Holland Road, has fully rebounded from the tornado.
The truth, he said, is that his “recovery” has been anything but.
“People come here and look around and say, ‘You must be glad the tornado came. With all the insurance money, you’re doing good,'” he said. “I want to punch them in the freaking face.”
Yes, his business is back after being literally flattened by the tornado, but it’s hardly better, he said.
Perhaps you saw the YouTube video made moments after the tornado passed as two employees emerge from shelter to find the One Stop garage building destroyed, its inventory of cars violently scattered here and there, and debris and trees all over the place.
Bell wasn’t there when the tornado hit. He and a girlfriend were in the stands at Fenway Park. Christopher Mendek, one of his employees, called to say a storm was coming through and then the phone went dead. Bell tried calling Mendrek back but could not get through. When he finally got through hours later, Bell recalls Mendrek telling him, “It’s all gone.”
“I thought he meant the storm. But then he said, ‘No, everything is gone,'” Bell said.
When Mendrek sent Bell a photo showing the car lot, Bell recalls feeling as if he wanted to vomit.
Five years later, the garage is rebuilt on the same spot, there are vehicles out front marked for sale, and a couple of employees are tooling around on engines. One could look at the scene and think everything is back to normal.
“It’s never going back to normal,” Bell said.
He used to have 10 employees; now he has three.
And the garage had to shut down for three months over the winter. There was just not enough work coming in and not enough money in the bank to ride it out, he said.
He says “the biggest misconception” about his rebuilding is how much assistance he received from either the federal government or the state in his effort to rebuild.
“I didn’t see a freaking dime,” he said
“I did all this on my own,” he said. “I got nothing.”
He said his insurance paid him $350,000 to rebuild his garage on the condition that he build in the same place. But he was reimbursed only for two of the 10 tow trucks that he had on the road.
The storm swept away $1 million in used parts inventory, and none of that was reimbursed. Neither were the cars that he had on the lot for sale that were destroyed. Nor was his collection of musical instruments that were stored in the room above the garage.
“Nothing! None of it was covered,” he said.
He came to find that the insurance policy for his business contained, somewhere toward the bottom, the phrase “an act of God.” This was cited by the insurance for not reimbursing him for any losses beyond the building, he said. The tornado was considered an act of God, and acts of God are not insurable.
After the tornado, he sought out assistance through the Small Business Administration, the federal agency that was offering low-interest loans for disaster relief. The outcome was disappointing and frustrating, he said.
“I went to Monson every day for three months with my accountant. They were promising they would help with low-interest loans at eight-percent interest,” he said.
The loan officers kept saying there were there to help, he said, but in the end, the last thing they had to say was, “I’m sorry, you don’t qualify.”
As Bell recounts it, he did not qualify for a small-business loan because he could not demonstrate what his annual income was pre-tornado.
He said the loan officers seemed indifferent to his particular circumstance for why he could not demonstrate his annual income — namely that his office with all his files and records was blown away by a tornado.
A Republican article dated Aug. 11, 2011, two months after the tornado, features Bell talking about the problems he was having getting a small business loan. He said at that time that one of the sticking points was that he had no 2010 tax return on file. He said then he had asked for and had granted an extension to file his taxes, and was in the process of completing them when the tornado hit.
During a recent interview, he recalled feeling tired of repeatedly smashing his head against a bureaucratic wall over those first few months. Also it was never in his nature to ask someone else for help. So, he turned to what he knew best and went to work.
His property had to be cleared of debris, trees and scattered automobile parts. Tools and machinery that got tossed to the wind had to be recollected. Stacks and stacks of trees and vegetation and tons of recyclable metal were carted off.
“I crushed everything I had, got 70 grand, and just started cleaning up and fixing up.”
And then there were still customers coming to the shop to have work done on their cars.
The tornado cut as much as a mile-wide path through Brimfield. The One Stop garage was directly inside that path. But in other parts of town that were spared, life went on. Many customers who drove up to get work done on their car were surprised to find their local garage wasn’t there anymore.
A week after the tornado, One Stop rigged one of its hydraulic lifts to an air compressor, and Bell’s mechanics were able to do basic oil changes in the open air. When it started to rain, one would hold an umbrella over the other.
“That’s how resilient we were, because we had to be,” he said. “No one was helping us.”
In the days after the tornado, National Guardsmen showed up to stand watch at the site. Tired of them standing there while volunteers, some of them kids, struggled to move debris, Bell told them to take a hike.
When the members of the Red Cross came out two weeks after the tornado to see how everyone was holding up, he told them to go to the same place he told the National Guard to go.
“I’m not a crybaby. I’m a tough kid,” he said. “I’m doing this all on my own, but it does piss me off that the government doesn’t help.”
Five years later, he’s still paying to removing trees, still removing scrap metal from his large lot. Five years later, he said he’s still gotten no help.
When Bell says he did not receive any help, he means from federal and state agencies. His friends, church and the greater Brimfield community have helped him in more ways than he can repay, he said.
He said 67 people from his high school class came out to help with the cleanup. Friends arranged a concert amid the wreckage weeks after the tornado, raising $8,000 for Bell. He split the money with neighbors on either side of him.
“The only people who came to my rescue were the church, the community, my family and friends,” he said. “I got nothing from the government or anyone else. No help whatsoever — and that left a bad taste in my mouth.”
Back in his office, Bell opened up a scrap book he started during the cleanup. It has before-and-after photos of his lot. But there are also pages and pages of documents from his office that people found miles away and mailed back to him.
His checkbook was found in Falmouth; car titles and repair orders were found in Boston.
“They got up into the jet stream and zoom!”
He also keeps in his office a broken VHS tape that one of his employees found early in the cleanup. It must have been dropped on the One Stop lot as the tornado rolled through.
The tape was for the 1996 movie “Twister” starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton.
“How ironic is that?” Bell said. “It came from someone’s house. I had to keep it.”
Throughout the interview, Bell seemed cheerful and pleasant, although he argued with that description.
“I wouldn’t say I’m cheerful,” he said.
Perhaps it’s a case of gallows humor then?
“I don’t know what I got. I think I’m just numb to everything.”
By Patrick Johnson | pjohnson@repub.com
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on May 31, 2016 at 6:30 AM, updated May 31, 2016 at 6:31 AM
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Aerial photo of the car lot behind One Stop Car Care and Classic Heaven. Trees covered the lot and hid it from the road. Photo courtesy of David Bell.
