Joplin Tornado Disaster Recovery

This is a sabotage post by Spencer about the Joplin Tornado disaster that hit our region a couple weeks ago. I cut this post out of my journal... so forgive me for being lengthy and not having Mardee's wit that probably keeps you reading our family blog. The tornado hit on 5/22, and I was there the weekend of 5/28-29. Here is the post:

I spent two days this weekend (including Mardee's and my 7th Anniversary) in disaster recovery mode up in Joplin, MO (about an hour away) where the most deadly tornado on record struck last Sunday.

The night the tornado struck Joplin, we were at Cameron's birthday party at the Flemming's house. As we started to leave their house around 8PM the tornado sirens went off, and we ran back into their house, turned on the news, and started helping them unload their closet under the stairs in preparation to ride out the tornado. The warning subsided and we rushed home, put the girls to bed in our closet so they would be downstairs in a windowless room if anything happened, and kept watching the storm. I have never seen so much lightening in the sky as it constantly flickered with lights. The wind was roaring but it was from far away. From 11:30-12:30 we had to get our daughters up and sit on the uncomfortably small floor of our laundry room with sleeping girls sprawled all over us. It was exhausting for everyone, and scary when we could hear the hail pelting the side of our house with a lot of force. Not knowing what is going to come next or how severe it will be is a chilling feeling. In the quieter moments, looking around at my wife and three wonderful girls in that tight room was heartwarming as everything that mattered in the world seemed to be right there around me. As long as we were safe, the rest of the house seemed like peanuts. Seeing the devastation that happened in Joplin this weekend made me realize how good we had it. Tuesday was a big tornado scare as the conditions were apparently perfect for an even worse tornado according to the meteorologists. They let us out of work early and by the time I got home, Mardee had all our overnight bags packed up and was ready to follow the Flemmings down to Little Rock to dodge the tornados. In the end we drove all that way, stayed in a crummy hotel, and nothing happened by way of tornado.  It was a fun little midweek adventure anyway.

The stake asked for 200 men to spend Saturday and Sunday up in Joplin to help make damaged homes more liveable. There was an astonishing initial sign up of 256 men, and I think even more than that actually showed up on Saturday. The current count is that about 150 people were killed in the tornado, but being up there and seeing the scope of the devastation is seems like a miracle that only that many died. It was BAD.

Stores, houses, parks, trees, billboards, cars... EVERYTHING was destroyed in the main part of town. Fortunately there were also large areas of the town that were relatively unaffected, but where it was affected, there were roofless stacks of rubble, banged up and frequently upside down cars, and stripped trees (many of them sideways) as far as you could see. At our second house it was apparent that there will be repurcussions for years as the lawn was filled with broken glass from that house and others to the degree that we would never be able to make it safe to walk around barefoot again.  Time and a lot of grass growth is all that you can hope for.

Given the exent of the devastation there is only so much that a group of untrained, soft-handed desk jockeys can do. The Church was impressively organized, having rented out a warehouse and sent disaster relief coordinators and tons of supplies from Salt Lake City. They handed out work orders in the morning and we went out and conquered. Our sweet spot was the houses that were too damaged to live in, but could be liveable with a few fixes. We chainsawed fallen trees to pieces, patched up roofs with tarps, removed debris, and knocked down trees that were damaged from the storm and posed a threat of falling over as a result. It was hard and unglamourous work. The pervasiveness of the debris that was there was amazing.

Here is a picture of our team cutting down a damaged tree (Alan Shipman, Bishop Chandler, Jim Dragovich, Pat Smith, Dan Flemming, Jake Edgington, Allen Stewart, and Jaron Chandler).

Towards the end of our time at this house, the owner came out with wet eyes and mentioned how relieved he was that they finally found his 90+ year old mother. They knew she survived the tornado, but she disappeared shortly after and only found her 6 days later. It was a taste of the confusion and upheaval this tornado brought to these people at a personal level.

One great part of the experience was to see the community rally together in support. In addition to the trucks driving around handing out food and water (many of which were people driving around acting on their own initiative), we were approached by women of the 7th Day Adventist Church down the road and invited to come partake of a warm meal. The 10 of us happily went there in our highlighter yellow "Mormon Helping Hands" shirts and had a delicious vegetarian buffet of homemade dishes. These people were incredibly giving, and it seemed like an extra special gift as it was done on their Sabbath. After we left, they mentioned they were going to leave the door to the church unlocked in case anyone needed to use the bathrooms. Very trusting and good people.

One of the more angering aspects of the trip was hearing the stories about Looters. In two of the houses we went to, looters came after the tornado damaged the houses so severely and made off with their TV's, computers, and stereos.

One thought that really stuck with me on this trip was the talk by the local stake president, who quoted from Matthew where it says "If you have done it unto the least of these... you have done it unto me." We really were able to see some sweet spirits of people we would not normally run in the same circles with. One house was owned by an older (mid 50's) lesbian couple whose house had been ransacked by the storm. The entire house visibly slid on the foundation and there were cracks all around where the ceiling met the walls where you could see how the wind ripped the roof off from most of the house, but then was laid back down on the walls. Windows were all smashed and you could see perfect silouettes on the wall where some object between the wall and the window shielded the wall from the mud that was flying horizontally into the house. These women had a great sense of humor about their destroyed house and cars. As we were walking past their crumpled truck with all our tools she called out "careful not to scratch my truck!" It was impressive to see how much humor they brought to the situation. Only a couple minutes later one of them had a swing the other way and was sobbing on the porch about how much they had lost or someone they had lost, or who knows what.  Humor has an interesting way of helping people rise above their situation for the moment.

The last house we went to was another one of the "least of these" experiences. It was an older man's house who was outside when the storm came and started ripping up trees. He made it inside and dragged the kids into the hallway, threw a mattress on top of them and lied on top of it until the storm passed. It knocked down several trees... one of which fell on his house. As we were cleaning up the debris, I cleaned up a ton of empty beer cans that had been in a bag in his back yard before being strewn everywhere. I had sympathy for what this family had been through but the cues all around led to me categorizing him as "white trash" in my mind. As we were about to leave, he came out to his porch and called us all around and asked if we could pray together before leaving. He offered one of the most sincere and humble prayers I have ever heard. First thanking the Lord that they were all okay, then asking that such devastating calamities not fall on them again, and then saying that if they ever have to go through such a trial again, that they will be blessed with understanding and not be mad at the Lord. I had so much to learn from people who fall into the social categories that are the butts of many jokes. Serving "the least" of my brethren /and sisters was truly a humbling experience.

The second to last house we worked on was the most devastated of the houses. There was a doublewide mobile home in the backyard, a very tall workshop, and 3 SUVs/trucks and a large camping trailer. The doublewide mobile home rolled over the cars... smashing one completely, and the roof and walls blew to pieces while the floor of the home blew way up on top of the roof of the work shop. In the picture below, the green floor on the roof was originally just to the right of this picture before it barrel rolled over the cars (losing the roof and walls) and ended up on the roof of their workshop.  The camper trailer also rolled over and sustained a lot of damage. The roof to the main house was severely damaged in many areas, and completely gone in about a fifth of the area up top. It was quite a sight.

The woman in this house asked me if I wanted to hear a miraculous story, and I said sure. She said some people were driving down the road when the tornado came. They saw the black cloud and left their cars running in the road and tried to run for shelter. They said they saw people waving them over to the side of the house and ran to the side and started banging on the door. About 15 feet from the back door was the tornado shelter in the ground, under a sliding steel door. The people from the house were in there and said they could hear people pounding on their steel door. They slid it open and saw the people at the back door of the house and yelled for them to come over and brought them into their tornado shelter. The people from the cars thanked them for waving them over from the road, and they said they had been in the shelter the whole time. When the family that had been in the shelter mentioned that they were glad the others banged on the shelter door so they could hear them, they mentioned they had been at the door the whole time. She attributes the people waving those coming from the road over to their house, and the banging on their tornado shelter door to angels. That just might be so.

Probably the craziest story I heard was from a woman we gave supplies to on our way back to the tent city on the first day. She said that there were 10 in their family in the area and was grateful they all were okay. Her middle-aged daughter jumped in the car when they heard about the tornado watch and ran to grab something before the storm came. 7 minutes after the watch was issued, the tornado came and started to lift her car. She floored it and zipped around a bank drive through, where she rode out the storm for about 2 minutes while the tornado passed through. Once it passed, the neighborhood was a different place. She went to a house that was reduced to rubble and found a pregnant woman. She pulled her from the rubble and found she was dead. She then looked down the road and saw a man lying face down in a pool of water. She ran and flipped him over. He had been unconcious in the water and was drowning. She saved him. She then heard screams and ran to another house were 5 kids were trapped under a refrigerator. She moved the fridge and got them free. It is amazing how suddenly everything turned into a nightmare, and the heroism that every day citizens displayed when faced with that.

Another inspirational character was Ryan (from Littleton, CO). He is a 20 year old LDS boy who jumped in his car and started driving over after he found out that there were people from the church organizing a help effort. He drove by himself through the night and got there with nothing planned out. I met him by the showers and he asked how he could get on a team. I told him to join ours. That boy could work too. At the end of Sunday when our team was leaving he went to the coordinators from SLC and started asking if there was any other thing he could do to help and if he could keep his little tent on the property after everyone else left so he could be there and find more ways to help. I thought missing my anniversary was a sacrifice, but it was nothing to this guy.

Here are some other pictures that show the devastation to the city.

That tall building is the hospital.  The windows were all broken and several patients and medical equipment were thrown around through the halls of the building.

This is just one of many houses in a neighborhood that was severly desimated by the storm.  This is an average house in this area.