But first, back in 2025, an EF4 tornado cut a 60-mile-long path of destruction between London and Somerset.

News accounts at the time covered the destruction to homes and businesses, but what you may not have heard about was the destruction to nature.

For 20 years, researchers in the area had been restoring native wetlands.

And in one night, those wetlands became the scene of unbelievable destruction.

Buildings can be repaired, but what about endangered native plants?

We went to the scene to learn more.

When you see this wooded area near Pulaski County, it looks as beautiful and pristine as other forests in the Commonwealth.

But then, it comes into view.

A defined and massive scar on the landscape.

[thunder rumbling] This is actual video of what caused it.

On the night of May 16, 2025, a large and deadly EF4 tornado, at times up to a mile wide, plowed through the area.

The tornado was on the ground for almost an hour and a half, killing 18 people and injuring 108 others along a 60-mile path of destruction.

Damage to the communities of London and Somerset was significant.

Homes and businesses are logically the immediate concern in the aftermath of such a catastrophe, but the destruction to nature is also significant.

The Francis Johnson Palk State Nature Preserve was absolutely decimated by the storm.

Note how many of the trees weren't blown over or snapped in two.

They were twisted apart.

Take us back to May 16, 2025, the day before the tornado came through.

What did this area look like?

A lot different than it looks like now.

This was a mature forest.

We had done a tremendous amount of work over the last few years to really open up that mid-story.

We used prescribed fire a lot.

We really had it looking good.

It was on the trajectory that we wanted, but it was all woods back then.

And then, after the evening of May 16th, is this pretty good indication of what the whole area looked like at that time?

Once the tornado hit, obviously, because of the impact of the community here, we weren't able to come down for a week or two.

We didn't want to be in the way of some of the response that was going on in the community, getting people back into their homes.

When I first saw it, honestly, I drove right past it because I was used to seeing the entrance look one way and wasn't prepared for what I saw, to the point that I drove past the site.

I wasn't prepared for it.

It just looked different.

The whole landscape looks different out here.

[music playing] A big push behind the work here was to help preserve this rare and endangered plant, the white fringeless orchid.

That is on the federal endangered and threatened species list.

It lives in these little wetland seep areas.

We've been managing the property for over a decade for them, and that's what we're going to continue to do now is, “See?

Okay, we've got a change in the landscape here.

What do we need to do to make sure that that population continues to thrive?” It's not easy getting to the plants.

You have to maneuver a path that's been cut through the destruction and then work your way through mud, thickets, and swampy underbrush.

It's here where you find a very specific area where the orchids bloom.

We're in the headwater seep, and it's quite a treat.

All of the orchids are in full bloom right now.

These wetlands occur at the headwaters of these watersheds, and they're really close to the uplands.

You can see how the wetlands and uplands kind of integrate.

These headwater seeps have a thin fragipan layer in the soil, so that's just a kind of a clay layer that helps hold water.

The orchids bloom for just a few weeks each year.

In this small patch, there was another rare variety, the orange bog-crested orchid.

Littlefield and her colleagues first found the orchids here in 2006.

They'd worked hard to keep them in existence, but feared all was lost after the tornado.

Post-tornado, I think within a week, me and two other folks hiked back into this area, into the seeps, to see what level of damage had occurred and to see how many trees had piled onto the wetlands.

It was hard getting back here.

It took a lot longer than it did before.

We had to climb over hundreds and hundreds of trees up and down.

It was crazy.

In addition to helping the orchids survive, Couch and his staff are using this devastated landscape as a teaching and learning tool.

Obviously, this tornado had a huge path, over 100 miles that it was on the ground.

It impacted a lot of land that wasn't owned by nature preserves or by the state of Kentucky, so we want to leverage what we're doing here to be able to teach other landowners that have had the same impact how do they manage their woods.

This is a great opportunity to see how a woodland responds.

Again, it's just saplings right now.

And if you don't do some targeted management through prescribed fire and invasive species control, it's going to stay as a thicket for a long time.

But if you do the work, you could actually get this to recover over the next possibly 10, 20 years to get another growth of oak saplings and hickories and pines that are going to come into this area.

So, if I'm understanding you correctly, you're trying to pull a lot of the biomass out of here.

Then once you do that, it's a controlled burn to take everything down to kind of a starting point.

And then at that point, you start to reintroduce native species.

Is that kind of a good synopsis?

Right.

What we're hoping is that a lot of the native species are already in the seed bank.

They're going to start growing up on their own.

We may do some targeted tree planting in some places.

But again, we're just kind of going to go through this one step at a time and see how nature responds to each of our actions.

Do you think it'll ever look like it did on the day before the tornado struck, or is this going to be an area that's forever going to be impacted?

It won't go back to the way it looked in my lifetime, and that may be a good thing.

Because, again, we have been actively managing this site for the last over 10 years.

We were trying to get it back to what we thought it should look like already.

We hope that in the next decade or two, it'll be what we want it to be, but it likely won't go back to what it was.

So, we're seeing it as an opportunity to really get in and say, “Okay, how do we take a site that went through this massive devastation and manage it back to a natural community again?” So, it's pretty exciting for us.

[music playing]