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Cedar Valley News — May 19, 2025
From the Editor’s Desk: What We Build Before the Storm
By: Teresa Nikas, Editor
The sky outside my office window is clear today. Blue, calm, even generous. It’s the kind of sky that makes you want to forget just how fast things can change.
This weekend, entire neighborhoods in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas were stripped bare by tornadoes that struck without mercy. At least a dozen communities have been displaced. Families lost homes, memories, people they loved. Lives turned inside out while the rest of the country was still finishing coffee.
It’s natural, in a quiet town like ours, to feel removed. We aren’t in the path. Our homes still stand. But when disaster draws that kind of line — between those who can still put dinner on the stove and those who can’t — we ought to ask ourselves what we’re doing with the calm before our own storm.
In Cedar Valley, we don’t traffic in panic. We never have. We traffic in readiness. In neighborly gestures. In casseroles and gas cans and phone trees that still work when Wi-Fi doesn’t.
If a storm like this ever comes for us — and someday, something will — we won’t out-muscle it. But we can out-prepare it. Not just with bottled water and flashlights, but with the kind of social infrastructure that doesn’t go down when the lights do.
Check your kit. Sure. But also check on your neighbor.
Charge your battery packs. But also ask your street who knows CPR.
Stock up on canned beans. Also, look around and remember there may be people who do not have a way to evacuate.
What we build before the storm is what carries us through it. And what we choose to rebuild afterward says everything about who we are.
Let’s not wait until the wind rises to show one another what Cedar Valley can do.