For Tammy Echevarria, printed photos of her current home in Upper Dublin Township didn’t constitute a basic necessity. That is, until a rare storm hit the region in 2021.

The remnants of Hurricane Ida swept through the Northeastern U.S. on Sept. 1 that year, creating an EF2-level tornado. More than 1,000 homes were damaged in Upper Dublin and 100 homes became uninhabitable. The roof of Echevarria’s home was torn off, taking the back half of her house. The Upper Dublin Township building, where Echevarria worked, was devastated and the police department was displaced. The family lost most of its photos during the storm and there were none of the old house, which has been her family’s home since 1968.

“We lost so many things that we didn’t even know we had anymore,” Echevarria told the Local. “So now [in our rebuilt home], everything has a place. We’re very simple now. Nothing’s cluttered.”

This year, on Sept. 1 — five years to the day since Ida struck the area — Temple University and Upper Dublin Township hosted an event, “From Disturbance to Discovery: A Living Landscape Five Years Later,” at the Temple Ambler Learning Center to reflect on the tornado’s impact. The event, with more than 300 registered attendees, focused more on the positive change that has stemmed from the storm, rather than the damage.

“The fact that both a hurricane and a tornado hit this region of the U.S. is uncommon, and that’s something we need to monitor and understand. There is so much that we can now learn about climate change and other things from this,” Amy Freestone, then-director of the Temple Ambler Field Station, said shortly after the storm. “We are now a disturbance lab, and we have some really interesting research questions ahead of us. These are not the questions that we expected to study, but we’re biologists, and we follow nature. This is where nature has decided to take us.”

Since then, staff and students haven’t interfered with the natural regeneration of the area, and instead have studied the plant and wildlife recovery from the storm, said Brent Sewall, director of the Temple Ambler Field Station, who noted that the 2021 tornado was the first one he’d seen in Pennsylvania. Some of the students’ research was on display at the event. More than 100 internships have been completed at the field station.

The studies are helping researchers understand how the landscape responds and adapts to disasters, as climate change leads to more extreme weather events, Sewall said. Studies show that tornadoes are growing increasingly stronger and are moving eastward, according to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.

At this month’s event, representatives of Ambler Arboretum, Temple Ambler Field Station and Upper Dublin Township described to the audience how the university and surrounding communities not only recovered but evolved in the past five years.

“The tornado is part of our history. But the way we responded to it, and what we continue to build from that response, is what makes us who we are,” said Mariana Bonfim, managing director of the Temple Ambler Field Station.

Echevarria, the assistant director of the Upper Dublin Parks and Recreation Department, said she gained an expanded support system and rebuilt the home with her family.

“Five years later, I’m incredibly grateful for how far we have come,” she said during a panel discussion at the event. “We’re all here. We are better than we were before… people I didn’t even know stepped forward to help out during my recovery.”

The storm tore through the center of Temple University’s Ambler campus. Winds as high as 130 mph damaged hundreds of trees, some of which were more than 100 years old, and every university building was devastated to various degrees, according to a Temple University release from 2021. The roof of West Hall’s east and west wings was removed.

The Ambler campus sustained more than $10 million in damage, Vicki Lewis McGarvey, vice provost for University College and director of Temple University Ambler, said in an email. The recovery efforts were funded by the university’s insurance company, FM Global, and Temple University’s relief fund. The state and federal emergency management agencies reimbursed some of those costs. Classes went online for two weeks.

In summer 2021, the 2,500-square-foot field station was in the midst of installing a forest plot at its Temple Tree Observatory as a part of the laboratory’s research programming. But many trees were toppled during the six minutes of winds that September. A third of all recorded trees were lost, some of which were more than 100 feet tall.

The field station staff saw the damage as a research opportunity.

Over the past five years, Ambler Arboretum planted more than 1,000 trees to replace the 500 lost in the storm and created new features like the Climate-Resilient Garden, the Food Forest, the Campus Heritage Garden and new oak and maple plantings, Kathleen Salisbury, director of Ambler Arboretum, told the audience at the event. There are now more than 400 kinds of native woody plants at the arboretum.

“We’re learning a lot about resilience — how trees bounce back,” Salisbury said. “We have gone to municipal events to talk to municipalities about how you don’t have to take down your damaged trees. You can keep your damaged trees because they still offer so much, and much more than newly planted little trees.”

Stephanie Bross, gardens manager at Ambler Arboretum, was going into her senior year at Temple when the tornado hit. She contemplated quitting school because she thought the storm blew away her chances of working at an arboretum, but she said it was the right decision to stay.

“I think it’s made me a better horticulturist over the past five years, just seeing how all the trees that we have planted have grown,” she said.

In Upper Dublin, the township employees and residents stepped up during the disaster aftermath, Ira S. Tackel, chair of the Upper Dublin Board of Commissioners, said in a speech. Residents volunteered to assist with the recovery and the township never missed a payroll, he said.

But the long-term impacts of the storm eventually began to weigh on them. People lost their homes, township employees were displaced and the township’s insurance carrier became involved in what Tackel believes was one of the largest losses they’ve ever handled. Townships officials were forced to choose whether to simply rebuild or make significant changes to the landscape and public services.

“Resilience isn’t simply the ability to survive the moment when everything changes. Resilience is the ability to continue afterward, to take care of the people who are carrying the burden, to learn from what happened, and ultimately to build something better from what was lost. And five years later, I think that may be one of the most important lessons we carry forward from everything that we experience,” he said.

Tim Schuck, Upper Dublin Township’s fire marshal and fire services administrator, said during the event that the fire department strengthened its relationship with neighboring townships and created a community assistance response team with the police department. The civilian response team assists neighbors affected by natural disasters and other emergencies.

“We had so many resources coming in, stuff being donated, but we didn’t know what to do with it,” he said. “Groups came into the township to offer assistance and the neighbors helped neighbors. It’s community. Now you might not know your neighbor today, but something like this happens, you’re going to be their best friend for life.”

After the tornado, Echevarria’s husband planted a black gum tree at the far corner of their damaged backyard, so that “every time I went back, I looked at it and I knew that it was growing. It was strong. We’re growing. We are strong, and that we will be back there,” she said.

Echevarria had an artist paint a picture of the old house using Google Maps and gifted the painting to her children. She now has plenty of pictures of the new one on her camera roll.

Abby Weiss is an environmental reporter for the Local and a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at abby@chestnuthilllocal.com.