After the storm hit their rental house, the front of the building was gone, but a paper check still lay on the bookkeeper’s desk.
People and Animals Learning Services, or PALS, was damaged by the EF2 tornado that hit Bloomington on May 16, 2025. The horse-based therapeutic organization that hosts programs for adaptive riding, horsemanship and team building had to pause operations until around mid-June.
The hours after
Though the check was left in place, as was a pile of sawdust — two things PALS executive director Christine Herring thought would be flung far away in the chaos — more solid structures such as a storage barn for hay and the main arena were destroyed.
Herring said she was the first one on the scene after the storm. She had heard reports of a large debris field on Elwren Road, and she knew it had to be the PALS site.
“I drove out, maybe got about a mile and a half on (State Road) 45 and had to park my car, and ran,” Herring said. “And when I got here, of course, all of this was demolished.”
Herring estimated that 30 percent of the fencing around the site was down. Most of the 19 horses living at PALS were outside when the storm hit.
“As I ran up, I didn't see any horses,” Herring said. “I was expecting to see pretty horrible things, as you can imagine. But when I went over the hill here, I could see the horses had all grouped in a tight herd at the back of one of these pastures.”
Four more horses were trapped in a barn, Herring said, but they were safe. Out of the entire herd, only one horse was injured, and the wounds were minor.
“It was pretty amazing,” she said.
The days after
After the storm, it was time to begin the task of rebuilding.
“The night of the event, people just came out of the woodwork,” Herring said. “That was probably one of the most conflicting moments, because you're so happy to see people, but there are so many people saying ‘What can I do to help?’ in the middle of trying to triage everything.”
Herring said PALS has been receiving incredible support in their time of need from companies and individuals, from Bloomington and beyond.
Bruce Miller, a longtime PALS volunteer, helped pick up pieces of the barn, which he said had been strewn all over the site.
“I came out here two days later, and as soon as I turned off 45, I saw parts of the barn and I thought, ‘Whoa,’” Miller said.
Plenty of Bloomington-based companies came to pitch in as well. Crider & Crider, a contracting company, supplied PALS with temporary office space during the reconstruction. Carpenters from Loren Wood Builders donated their time to fix the fencing.
Jonelle Gross, operations manager at Loren Wood Builders, said employees Landon Mobley, David Parsch and Ellis Worstall went to help remove debris, dig new fence post holes and replace the fence.
“We just have a big internal motto that's just, you know, be good people and leave an impact,” Gross said. “And so, when there's opportunities like this that we can help give back to the community, we always look to see how we can help in those moments.”
The months after
Two months after the storm, the PALS site is still in the process of cleaning up debris so reconstruction can begin in earnest.
A manure storage barn has been repurposed as an indoor arena to give horses and campers relief from the summer heat. PALS resumed programming in mid-June, according to Herring.
“We're at a very limited basis because we can't have a lot of our specialized equipment we use to help people mount and things like that, but we were able to get back and get going,” she said.
One of the limiting factors for restarting programs is the lack of hydraulic lifts. PALS uses those for assisted riding programs, but they were destroyed in the storm. They couldn’t be used outside, anyways, and the main arena still needs to be reconstructed.
“It's our hopeful goal that we will have our main arena up, just not finished on the inside but the outside maybe by the time the snow flies,” Herring said.
While Herring said PALS’s insurance is very good, it won’t cover everything. PALS, she said, continues to need donations, which they are accepting on their website.
“You cannot plan for something like this,” Herring said. “We've been very determined and incredibly grateful for all of the outpouring from the community. And we're just moving forward.”
