News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Putnam County and the City of Cookeville have created a Mayfield Tornado Relief Fund to collect money that will aid the community affected by Saturday morning’s tornado.
Putnam Mayor Randy Porter said that he and Cookeville Mayor Ricky Shelton said that they wanted to do something to pay it forward after so many helped the community in March 2020.
“We were seeing the horrific images from Mayfield and it brought back a lot of memories for us with the tornado back in March of 2020,” Porter said. “And we knew how much of a difference it made in us being able to get money out to the victims and survivors to rebuild and recover.”
Porter said that they know what Mayfield is going through, and they hope this can help the community as it moves forward. He said that he and Shelton remember how instrumental those dollars are in getting the community back on its feet after such a tragedy.
“You have so many people that even though a lot of them have insurance, they may have deductibles, they may have lost stuff that’s not covered,” Porter said. “They need to be able to survive on a day-to-day basis with these normal necessities of life. So I know how much it meant to our community to do that and we felt so bad when we saw what was happening to them and even more people looks like maybe killed than what we had in Putnam County so we wanted to do something to help those folks.”
Porter said that the first two weeks after the tornado, particularly the first 48 hours, were the hardest to deal with. He said that they were able to survive with the help of outside communities reaching out.
Porter said that donations are being collected at One Bank of Tennessee and all of its branches. He said you can drop off or mail your donations, and to note that it’s for the Mayfield, Kentucky Tornado Relief Fund.
