It’s hard to believe that it has been a little more than six months since Alabama was struck by a series of killer tornadoes. It seems as if it were only yesterday.

The scars are still fresh. In Pleasant Grove, a whole swath of the city is gone. Much of Pratt City still lies in ruins. And closer to home in Fultondale, the evidence of the EF-4 twister, with a path a mile and a half wide before it finally pulled up just east of the city, is still all too clear — tarps on roofs, bare concrete pads where buildings once stood, and doubled-over light standards on Interstate 65, to name a few.

That’s to be expected. After a disaster of this scale, the cleanup will take quite some time.

Thankfully, progress is being made. A big-box furniture store reopened last week. Homes are being repaired. Slowly, lives are returning to normal.

Not all is well, though. Some businesses and organizations are having to deal with red tape to get back up and running — in every way from insurance payouts to government-related holdups. And some cities are tied up in red tape themselves — they are also waiting on insurance companies and on some FEMA reimbursements. It’s a troubling by-product of a major disaster that many communities have gone through over the years.

 The long process requires cooperation from residents, business and government. Let’s do what we can to make reconstruction as smooth as possible.

There’s too much at stake here.