MOULTRIE, Ga. — Louise McMurphy, a 96-year-old woman, was saved from her trailer home on Georgia Highway 133 by her family last Thursday. She currently faces pneumonia and her home was wrecked by the tornado that day.

Ronnie McMurphy, her grandson, said the home’s roof flew off, and soaked insulation caved in. A backyard tree was uprooted, which caused a host of issues on the trailer’s foundation.

“If you look at the trailer, you can see it’s leaning back,” he said. “And you see that porch? It picked that porch up and it’s not even connected to the trailer anymore. The trailer don’t even look like it’s leveled anymore.”

The tree, roof, and a plethora of debris including glass, tree limbs and other bits litter the backyard still. 

The family has attempted to work on the home, but as Ronnie McMurphy said, there are a lot of hidden issues needed to be discovered.

He said they may be looking to government aid in the near future.

“That’s what we’d like to try to do if we could because [Louise] isn’t carrying insurance, so you know how that goes,” he said.

The McMurphys are part of the demographic Sen. Kelly Loeffler is looked to address in her tour of storm damage Wednesday.

Loeffler met with local farmers at Farmer’s Gin and Peanut Company — just a few yards from Louise McMurphy’s mobile home — to discuss the variety of issues that may come in wake of last week’s tornado.

“Everything from cotton to produce — we need to assess the impact to our ag community. It is pretty serious,” she said.

Damage assessment is still going on, but she said the relief will be data-driven, asking what the injury count was and what was damaged. 

According to her, the next step is getting Georgia back on its feet with the “Rise Plan,” which focuses on reinvigorating the economy.

“[It’s} focused around four pillars: job creation, agriculture, supply chains moving to America and then families,” she said. “We also want to make sure we don’t enter an environment where litigation around COVID starts to ramp up.”

Red tape bureaucracy needs to get out of the way so farmers and everyone can get back to what they were doing, she said. 

Between COVID-19 and the weather damage, there’s a double whammy that farmers and Georgia overall face with reopening the economy. With it opening in phases, the focus will be safety.

“We’re looking at data, making sure the numbers reflect where we can manage this health crisis,” Loeffler said, referencing data from testing and its results. “Informed by those metrics then we can start to take gradual steps and assess the risk of starting to build up society again.”

Alongside that she said she’ll be making sure farmers will have all the tools they need to get back on their feet; however, relief among them and the rest of Georgia isn’t only monetary — it needs to be mental too.

Loeffler has served on the board of a mental health agency before and learned that the number one thing is to talk about mental health.

“These are challenging times and what we have to realize is that we are in this together,” she said. “And what I’ve seen these communities do is when someone asks for help there’s someone there helping them.”

She hopes this trend will continue through communities and from the government. While she’ll be proactively reaching out, she also asks that those in need reach out to her too.

Born from a fourth generation family farm, Loeffler said there’s never a day off for a farmer. They put everything on the line.

“When there’s natural disasters or a national health emergency, we can’t let that get in the way because our food supply is critical. This is becoming a national security issue,” she said.

She said that’s her message in Washington. As far as a timeline goes, she knows that she, GEMA and Gov. Brian Kemp have already started to discuss solutions.

As she’s a member of the federal task force planning to reopen America, she’ll be bringing what she learned from her tour when it meets in Washington next week. 

She’ll address the state with what she learned from the task force once she gets back at the end of the week. The aid that comes will be separate from relief given by the CARES Act.