Photographs by Mark Schiefelbein
Part 1: The Tornado
It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, and Jennifer Donaldson decided to take a nap. She had worked late at Freeman Hospital the night before, so she wasted little time climbing to the second-floor bedroom of her friend’s house. She heard the wind whistling through the window as she drifted off to sleep.
Shortly after 5:30 p.m., she awoke to hear shingles flapping against the house. As the wind picked up, it made a sound that she prayed she’d never hear again. She stood and hurried to the door to go downstairs. Just as she stepped into the hall, she looked up and saw the roof rip away from the house. Rocks and dirt began pelting her as she staggered backward from the force of the wind. Donaldson felt her feet being lifted off the ground.
That’s the last thing she remembers.
Just a few blocks northeast, at Saint Paul’s United Methodist Church, Becky Burress was slicing strawberries in the parish hall when she glanced out the window and saw a tree go down. She tucked herself underneath the mammoth dishwasher, and when she came out, the church was gone, the children’s daycare on the other side of the hall was damaged, and her car was totaled.
“Apparently, you’re not done with me in this kitchen,” she remarked aloud. “We’ve got a lot more people to feed now.”
Kristi Wells was staying on the fourth floor of St. John’s Regional Medical Center, where both her brother and mom were being treated. Wells’ brother, 56-year-old Kenneth Zaerr—a farmer and semiretired truck driver—had suffered multiple strokes more than a week earlier and her mother had been admitted with low blood sugar. When the nursing staff heard “Condition Gray,” they began directing patients to the hallway.
When Wells reached the hall, the lights went out. Unsure of what was happening, she made out a familiar face, a nurse’s aide named Damon. “He slid me underneath the nurse’s desk before I even knew what hit me.”
All around her, windows began shattering. She felt the floor shake and thought, “Oh my goodness, we are going down—and there are five floors above us.” The building shifted 4 inches from its foundation as the tornado passed over. Wells began screaming, “Save us, in the name of Jesus!” As she prayed, a chunk of something lodged in her throat, damaging her voice. As the tornado tore through the hospital, a nearby man was sucked out of the building and his wife was slammed into the windowsill.
“From what I understand, it only lasted a minute and a half,” Wells says, “but it felt like 20 minutes.”
Afterward, the entire hospital was dark. Using the light from her cellphone, Wells waded through water, insulation, and glass. Someone shouted that a patient was gurgling at the end of the hall, and she ran to help. It was her brother. “We’ve been in a really bad tornado,” she told him. Knowing he was likely to die anyway, she said gently, “If you want to go home, it’s OK.’”
From there, the tornado headed toward Range Line Road, picking up speed. Mark Bridges, the Newton County coroner, was with his wife at CiCi’s Pizza when the owner asked everyone to move to the back of the restaurant. “People kept going to the buffet,” says Bridges. When he and his wife went out to their car, he heard a guy in the parking lot say, “Look, there’s a funnel!”
“I’m not saying this was smart,” says Bridges, “but I thought, ‘I’m gonna outrun that thing.’ I headed east on 20th, trying to get ahead of it. About the time I got to Duquesne Road, a big box hit the back of my Suburban. In front of me I saw those blue paper towels you wash your windshield with.” They’d been sucked out of a dispenser, and they were swirling like a miniature, bright blue tornado.
He floored the Suburban, outran the winds, went south to the town of Diamond, then hit state Route 59 and circled down to Neosho.
John Tsangaris heard the second siren and asked the McDonald’s cashier to hurry. His daughter, Jeane, had just graduated from high school, crossing the stage with Athena, her service dog. John grabbed the white paper bag (“They still owe us two large fries!”) and drove off. At 20th Street and Range Line Road, it started sprinkling. Ten blocks west, at Connecticut Avenue, hail began falling with such force, John took cover in the Commerce Bank drive-through. A second later, all the car windows shattered, and he felt the car going sideways and saw pieces of a building in midair. His wife, Valetta, saw a woman’s body fly through the air and hit their car.
John pushed Valetta down with one hand and reached to the back seat to steady his daughter. Jeane, who has autism, was screaming in raw hysteria, begging them to kill her because she was so terrified. Valetta put her head up again and yelled, “I think we lost Athena!” Then Jeane’s voice came, quieter now, and logical, “But she’s still breathing!”
The dog had crossed over to Jeane and was lying on top of her, protecting her from the wind.
A few minutes earlier, when Brad and Lisa Banaka saw the radar map on TV and realized a tornado might be heading for their trailer park, they rushed out to their bright-red Chevy Cavalier and drove—straight into the tornado’s path. Hail pounded the roof, and they pulled into a carwash bay at 20th Street and Range Line Road to protect their new car’s finish. It was a 2004, but they’d just bought it two months earlier, when they moved to Joplin.
A row of explosions punched white zigzags into the green-gray sky as the tornado hit one transformer after another. Lisa held up her phone’s video camera. Brad grabbed her hand, swung it down, and covered her with his body as bits of wood and glass started flying.
Behind them, a car pulled up, looking for shelter. Lisa, who was driving, inched up as far as she thought she safely could. She felt the wind lift the Chevy and slam it down again. Then the roof crushed down on top of them. “Is it over?” she yelled, and Brad yelled, “Yes!”—and the wind and rain started up again. They’d been in the eye.
When calm finally came, she managed to recline the seat and wriggle out the passenger door. Brad’s legs were pinned under so many bricks, he thought they were broken. “Get me the hell out of here!” he groaned. She crawled out of the mangled car, stood, and saw an elderly woman, thrown from the car that had driven up behind them, lying on the ground. Bones broken, head injured, she was covered in blood and debris. Her husband was lying dead 15 feet away. They’d been on their way to church.
The Kia Sedona minivan barreled down Range Line Road. Kathy Baker—a sixth-grade teacher who’d just watched her oldest daughter, Breanna, graduate from Joplin High School—shouted at her daughter Molly to run a red light as she pulled into Walmart’s parking lot. To the west, Baker watched a “black wall, like nothing I’ve ever seen” move across Joplin. She and her daughters jumped out of the van and raced into the store. The lights were already out as someone directed the group back to the electronics section. Not a minute later, a deep roar consumed the room. The roof began to shake. Debris began hitting Baker, who kept her head down and eyes closed. One of her daughters glanced up to see the roof begin to peel back from the building and then slam back down. Sure they were going to die, Baker prayed with her daughters.
When the roar finally subsided, they tentatively stood up and made sure everyone was OK. Shelves were overturned—one couple was passing a baby through the space between them. Items blocked every aisle, making it a challenge to navigate the dark store, especially for Breanna, who was wearing a dress and heels for a graduation party that wouldn’t happen. “The one day that I wear high heels, I’m in an F5,” she thought.
At last, the family emerged from the building. Standing at the top of the hill and scanning the horizon, Baker saw nothing but miles of destruction.
“The whole city is gone,” she thought, “and we are all that’s left.’”
By 6:12 p.m., the deadliest tornado in six decades was over.
Sparkles of glass shards and clumps of sodden insulation were strewn across broken asphalt. Rubble grayed the landscape, but inside those jagged piles, you could make out muddied green surgical gowns, torn photos of pink-gowned bridesmaids, shiny toasters, and Cardinal-red ball caps. Trees had been yanked from the earth, root ball and all, or sheared of leaves; one had a mattress shoved between forked bare branches; another had sheet metal curved in a stranglehold around its trunk.
Roughly 8,000 structures, 400 businesses, and 18,000 vehicles had been destroyed. More than a thousand people were injured. The death toll would eventually rise to 162, more than three times the number of people killed in the Great Flood of ’93.
What the hell had happened?
Storm systems had merged unexpectedly, turning a gentle little tornado into a dervish that spun with 200-mph winds, yet moved forward so slowly—often less than 20 mph—that several people reported experiencing the eye. The twister pulled rain around itself like a cloak, so people weren’t even sure what they were seeing.
In 38 minutes, it had obliterated a third of the town.
Part 2: The Aftermath
Shortly after nightfall, after a search-and-rescue team had already cleared the area, two men desperately searched the Sunset Ridge area for Jennifer Donaldson’s body. A friend had called to check on Donaldson, insisting she was in the neighborhood when the tornado hit. The men had searched the house and found nothing.
Suddenly, they spotted a shoe in the midst of a pile of debris nearly 3,000 feet behind the house. Rushing over, they saw Donaldson lying unconscious beneath three massive trees. They ran to a neighbor’s house, got an axe, and cleared the trees out of the way. Carefully, they hoisted Donaldson onto a door torn from the house where she’d been staying. One man held her while another drove a John Deere Gator more than a mile to Freeman Hospital’s emergency room.
As soon as the storm passed, Steve Vanderbol jumped in his Toyota Land Cruiser. At W. 26th Street, he found a jogger who’d been killed: “It drove him head-first into the concrete.” An elderly woman down the street was halfway through her storm door—“not the screen, the metal part”—but alive. He wrapped her head to stop the bleeding, and neighbors drove her to Freeman Hospital. He continued through streets already jammed with debris, emergency vehicles, and rubberneckers, driving over a field and across downed telephone poles and careening off a retaining wall.
A former service Marine, Vanderbol’s kind of a cowboy, and his zeal would eventually rub officials the wrong way. But in the week after the tornado, it was he who commandeered medical supplies and klieg lights, cleared a triage area, coordinated hundreds of search-and-rescue volunteers, mapped the area of damage, overlaid a grid, and got every block on that grid searched three times.
The rain didn’t let up for two days, and by the time a new tornado warning was issued on Tuesday evening, adrenaline was sluicing so hard through Vanderbol’s body, all he could think was, “OK, bring it.” He’d seen a man’s face gone from the jaw up; held a woman’s brain in his hands; found a child’s fingers. He taught his volunteers to yell “Oorah!” (Marine motivation) when they found somebody alive. (“One day,” he says, “I screamed it 15 or 20 times.”) He penciled a small, fine, hard-to-see “J4” on the map whenever someone was found dead. When exhaustion took over, he asked out loud, “Why the f—k am I doing this?” Word spread, and half an hour later, a woman emailed him a photo of herself with her arms around her two children and wrote, “This is why you are doing this. Thank you for returning my kids to me.”
Sunday night, Sam Lutz was home in Wentzville, watching Family Guy with her 12-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son. A medic, she’d just graduated from nursing school two weeks earlier. She flipped to TV news and heard about the tornado.
Her daughter, Callie, saw her face and said, already resigned, “We’re goin’ to Grandma’s, aren’t we?” She knew her mom was in the national disaster-volunteer database.
Lutz nodded and got them packed. By 4 a.m. Monday, she was at the Joplin Fire Department waiting for an assignment. She thanked God she didn’t have a job yet; she could stay as long as she was needed. Vanderbol made her a team leader, putting her in charge of trauma triage. She also worked as a mobile medic, set up a first-aid tent for volunteers, gave tetanus shots, splinted possible fractures, and tended to dehydrated search dogs, gently removing wood fragments from their paws.
That first day, Callie texted her: “Mommy, were there kids there?”
“Of course, sweetheart,” Lutz replied. “It was just like if it happened in Wentzville.”
Wednesday, Callie texted again, an oblique “300 so far.”
“Three hundred what?”
“Toys. I started Operation Teddy Bear.”
All week, Sam kept hoping she’d be able to text Callie that they’d found Will Norton. Months earlier, Callie had discovered Norton’s “Willdabeast” videos on YouTube. He’d graduated from Joplin High the night of the tornado, and on the way home with his father, he’d been sucked through the sunroof of the family’s Hummer. Now he was missing, and Callie was checking the Help Find Will Norton Facebook page constantly.
Sam wasn’t giving up either: Survivors were still being found in far-flung regional hospitals, a coma or head injury having prevented them from calling their loved ones. On May 28, Sam was standing at the edge of a pond near Schifferdecker Avenue and W. 26th Street, talking to one of the dive team members.
“I think that’s him!” somebody yelled, and Sam turned to see a body pulled from the water. Her heart sank.
Mark Bridges, the Newton County coroner, dropped his wife off at home and emptied the back of the Suburban, making room to transport bodies. The tornado had hit just outside his county limits—most of Joplin is in Jasper County—so he’d be helping its coroner, Rob Chappel.
Once they set up refrigerated trailers at a temporary morgue, Bridges went over to a church on 20th Street where bodies were being brought. He recalls some people pulling up in a pickup truck and telling him, “We were driving down the street, and this woman’s relative asked if we would bring her body in. Here’s a note with information about who she is.” Other bodies had little notes tucked under their belts—or no identification at all. Tattoos helped, especially if they were elaborate, original, and had initials entwined.
“Early on—the first body I saw, as a matter of fact—the family made a false identification. They had the body sent to a funeral home, got him embalmed and dressed, and then when he was cleaned up, they looked again and said, ‘Oh, no, no, that’s not our son.’” Worried about more misidentifications by traumatized families, officials put strict procedures in place. “Then the families really got upset,” Bridges says.
“They said, ‘We would know our family member.’” Not necessarily—many of the bodies were filthy, mangled, or in pieces. But how do you convey that? Family members kept saying, “Just let us go to the morgue, and we’ll pick them out,” Bridges recalls. “And then the national media came in and sensationalized that. I tried to tell ’em, ‘We have got to do this right.’”
Lisa Devore, a nurse who worked at St. John’s Regional Medical Center, was listening to the radio at home in nearby Carl Junction when the tornado struck Joplin. The announcer focused mainly on the damage along Range Line Road. “Never did I hear that St. John’s had been hit,” she says. “I don’t think anybody knew the extent of it.”
Planning to help at the hospital, Devore raced to her car. As she drove south along Maiden Lane, she realized the western half of town had been destroyed. She spotted a group of people in scrubs walking north, away from the medical center, and rolled down her window. “Everyone is supposed to go to Memorial Hall,” one of the women told her. More than 180 patients from St. John’s were being transferred there or to other triage stations.
When Devore arrived at the makeshift medical center, she was directed to handle triage at the door. As the injured poured in—brought in by school buses, ambulances, cars driven by neighbors—she directed them into different sections of Memorial Hall. Those with the most severe injuries were rushed to the back. “Where they went from there, I have no idea,” says Devore. There were injured everywhere—“You couldn’t even see the floor.”
For medical supplies, it was “whatever we could get,” she says. Doctors worked without cardiac monitors. Devore overheard one nurse say, “We have to get oxygen—people are dying!”
Devore saw several patients who’d been transported from The Greenbriar nursing home, where at least 11 people had been killed. “A lot of them didn’t know their names or what was going on,” she says, then falls silent. “Maybe it was a good thing that some of them didn’t know.”
Earlier that afternoon, Joplin High’s principal, Kerry Sachetta, had watched 455 graduating seniors walk across the stage at Missouri Southern State University’s athletic center, on the northeast edge of the city.
After the ceremony, as he gathered his things to leave, staff told him a tornado had just been spotted west of town. Sachetta went to the basement and waited while the tornado passed through the city. When he heard the hail subside, he started home along Range Line Road. As he drove, he began receiving texts that the high school had been damaged. He noticed, as he passed 15th Street, “things were getting real different real quick.”
He thought he should quickly stop at his office, but he couldn’t find the building. Most of the neighborhood’s street signs, homes, and businesses were gone. Franklin Technology Center, across the street from the high school, was a pile of rubble—at first, Sachetta mistook it for the school’s greenhouse. “From a distance, the high school looked bad,” he says. “The closer you got, the worse it got.”
The school’s security-camera footage captured what had occurred: A digital clock in an eerily still hallway showed 5:40 p.m., one minute before the tornado hit the school. Seconds later, pounding winds and debris shattered the glass entryway doors and windows. Classroom doors burst open as the 190-mph winds tore through the school, sending chairs and desks flying across rooms. The gymnasium’s roof collapsed, crashing down on the bleachers. On the lawn, beyond the security camera’s view, letters on the “Joplin High School” sign flew off.
“They told us the real world sucked,” Keegan Tinney joked to a friend after the tornado, “but I didn’t think it’d only take 15 minutes to find out.”
He was late leaving his Joplin High School graduation ceremony, still chatting with friends, when his father, who runs the Newton County ambulance service, called his cell. “Get your ass home!” Rusty Tinney said without preamble. Hearing the urgency in his father’s normally calm voice, Keegan drove his Chevy Avalanche over the grass, cutting over to Range Line Road, barely able to see but flooring it anyway. When he burst through their front door, his father said, “St. John’s has been hit. Go get changed.”
Keegan had just completed a six-month emergency medical technician program at local Crowder College, getting a jump on his future plans to be an ER physician. He went with his father (a paramedic), two of his sisters, and a future brother-in-law (all EMTs). When they couldn’t drive any farther than 20th Street and Range Line Road, they started doing triage right there, just north of what had been a Walgreens. “We had people with amputations, impaled objects,” Keegan says. “One guy had a piece of two-by-four through his arm, and there was nothing I could do except stabilize it with tape and send him to the hospital. A little girl had open compound fractures of both legs. You’d think this person was bad and then turn around and see something even worse.”
Several times, people came up saying, “Keegan, can you help me find my mom?” or “Have you seen my dad?” It was dark, and he couldn’t recognize them through the mud and rain, but he knew that he knew them—they were still wearing their graduation gowns.
Denny White, the mayor of Duquesne, looks a bit like Charlton Heston—if Charlton Heston were standing on a used car–and–office furniture lot in an untucked shirt trying to figure out how to salvage his town.
Duquesne runs along the east edge of Joplin, and the tornado took its population from 2,000 to 1,100, destroying 250 of 750 homes and damaging 250 more. Two minutes after the tornado, White was in his car. “It was still raining, and people were walking down the street with blood running down their faces,” he says.
His office was demolished, and his 85-year-old mother lost her century-old lath-and-plaster house and eight of her farm’s nine outbuildings. When he came to pick her up, she greeted him, “We’re in a pickle, aren’t we?”
White says Duquesne looked “like something just got down on the ground and scrubbed. It didn’t leave anything.” Across from his car lot, he saw “a semitrailer and a dead cow inside a fence, and the whole thing—cow, fence, semi—had blown half a mile.”
He and his wife lived at Duquesne’s City Hall for the next 19 days, coordinating hundreds of volunteers and beginning the endless jumps through hoops all the federal and state relief services required. “They kind of bounce you around, and you kind of feel like a ball after a while, trying to find somebody who has the answer—but they get the job done,” he says. “That first night, I kept asking myself, ‘What are we ever going to do?’ But two days later, the volunteers came.”
White taped up the flagpole in the town’s roundabout for a poignant Memorial Day celebration. The Duquesne roundabout had become a symbol. People were trapped there during the tornado, and Duquesne Police Chief Tommy Kitch set up a command post right in the middle. “I didn’t have to call a single one of my guys in; they all started showing up,” he says.
“We had an emergency-action plan for the city,” Kitch says, “but the emergency-action plan didn’t call for total devastation.” He hadn’t expected, for example, to lose water for four days. “I have a 1970s Army-surplus generator, and that thing ran for 101 hours straight. Pallets of water started coming from somewhere, and somebody sent porta-potties.”
In the post-tornado chaos, much of the help arrived anonymously; later, people would say, over and over, “I have no idea where that came from… I just wish I knew who to thank.” Kitch happily directed setup for those porta-potties—“but I never thought I was going to be feeding 1,200 people there the next day, or I would’ve had them moved farther out!” Barbecue places came down from St. Louis and Kansas City, he says, and the Amish and Mennonites brought bread and pies and cakes—“The Mennonites were driving the Amish!”
That first night, he went out on the back roads to figure out who needed what. People saw his familiar black Chevy Tahoe and ran to tell him there were people injured, including a woman whose leg was almost severed. Kitch waved over a young man in a Nissan pickup who’d been following him, trying to get out of town. “Now you’re going to transport injured people,” the chief informed him.
“We put seven or eight in my Tahoe: an elderly lady with a compound fracture in her arm, a young lady with a piece of wood stuck in her back, head injuries. The woman with her leg almost severed sat in the back of the pickup between a fireman’s legs, to keep her stable.” He pauses. “I don’t know who the fireman was, either. He was in full bunker gear, and he was not one of ours.”
Among the first things that Joplin city manager Mark Rohr witnessed after rushing into town was a van with a windshield blown out and two men dead inside. By the time grant coordinator Becky Brill arrived at the emergency operation center, Rohr was standing off to the side. “I could tell by the look on his face that he was royally shook up,” she says.
Looking around the room, she saw roughly 40 people, half of whom were in camouflage, crowded inside the basement of the Dr. Donald E. Clark Public Safety and Justice Center. Rohr pulled himself together and helped organize a massive search-and-rescue effort. “In my mind, a [disaster response] plan doesn’t do any good—you can’t write this down in a book,” he says. “It’s just too massive.”
Around 9:30 p.m., Rohr and Fire Chief Mitch Randles went up in a helicopter to tour the damage. Peering through night-vision goggles, Rohr saw that the tornado had cut a 6-mile swath through Joplin.
“It was overwhelming,” he admits. “But you can only have that luxury in my position for about 15 seconds. Then you had to put it out of your head and figure out, ‘What do I do?’”
Part 3: The Rebuilding
When Jennifer Donaldson regained consciousness, she remembered talking to a young man, someone she’d never met, but who she felt like she’d known for years. They’d discussed a great many things: family, work, life in general. Finally, hearing voices calling her name, she’d told the man she had to go.
When her eyes fluttered open, Donaldson was at Freeman Hospital. A doctor and nurse were standing over her, saying her name. She had suffered a brain bleed, fractured a vertebra, broken 11 ribs and her left leg, and shattered her left elbow. “But that was it,” she says. “There are so many other things that could have gone wrong.”
Thirty days later, she was released from the hospital. It was then, while scanning photos in the newspaper, that she recognized a familiar face. It was the young man she remembered talking to while she was unconscious. Hysterical, she told her husband, “I’ve got to find this guy—he was with me and kept me calm. This was the guy!”
“Jennifer,” her husband replied, “those are the people that died in the storm.”
People talked endlessly about the garden hose that impaled a tree; the canned foods still lined up neat as a pin on the shelves of a dollar store with its roof blown off; the house that had been torn in half, but still had dinner on the dining-room table.
The week held unforgettable horrors: volunteers sawing through debris then screaming, “Oh my God!” because a dead body was trapped beneath it. A rescue worker finding the purse, hand, and ear of a young woman whose mother had shown a picture of her in those earrings.
There also were daunting acts of heroism. Don Lansaw, a 31-year-old former football player, had just gone to get frozen yogurt with his wife, Beth; when the tornado hit, he shielded her with his body and died saving her. Christopher Lucas, a 27-year-old Navy veteran who managed the Pizza Hut on Range Line Road, guided more than a dozen people into a freezer, then left to find a rope to tie the door closed—and was killed before he could get back to safety. Grace Layug Aquino, a 46-year-old who’d moved to Joplin from the Philippines, died with her arms around her 12-year-old son, Malachi.
There was pure joy when loved ones were found alive. And there were small satisfactions, like seeing a twice-caught looter duct-taped to a tree for two hours. Or seeing a burly firefighter, his arms covered in blood, cradling something he identified as “one really pissed-off cat.”
Joplin residents took in friends who were homeless and helped them sort through the rubble of their belongings. “You learned not to question anything a homeowner asked you to pack,” says Jane Cage, who now chairs the Citizens Advisory Recovery Team. Minds numbed, people would reach eagerly for the top to a broken candy dish, the one remaining teacup in a set, a heavy sink they had nowhere to install. Cage bit her tongue and placed these illogical mementos neatly into a cardboard box—when she could find one. Boxes were treasure in those weeks, plastic tubs a hotter commodity than American jeans in Russia.
As life resettled itself, attendance shot up at public meetings, church services, and community events. People needed the reassurance of seeing each other, the normalcy of routine, the catharsis of telling and hearing tornado stories.
Trees began to grow back, not branching with their former grace, but growing jungle-lush close to their trunks, as though they dared not spread too far.
By September, a record-setting amount of debris had been cleared—and the randomness of the devastation was even more obvious. Walmart was rubble, but the nearby Hobby Lobby was entirely intact; a few doors down in the same strip mall, there was complete devastation; on the parking lot, the tiny Shake’s Frozen Custard shack was untouched, its pink neon a perfect outline.
Near Joplin Regional Airport, rows of Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers glare white above gravel, hard-baked mud, and a few snarls of crab grass. Aluminum-foil “curtains” deflect the sun. One woman’s hung a pink-and-white polka-dot scarf; somebody else has stuck an American flag in the porch light’s bracket.
Melba Hitchcock eases herself down onto the yellowish wood of the trailer steps, keeping a firm hold on her dog Zeus’ taut lead. There wasn’t even room for the 10-pound terrier when Melba and her husband, both on oxygen, were sleeping on their son’s dining-room floor. The minute they were approved for a FEMA trailer, Zeus returned from exile.
They used to live at 20th Street and Missouri Avenue, in a small rented house whose only interior room was a closet. That’s where they rode out the storm. (“We’re quite big people,” she says, “so it was kind of hilarious.”) A few weeks later, they gathered up what was left and got about one-fourth of their security deposit refunded: “Our landlord said, ‘I need to come and make sure you didn’t scratch up the walls.’ There was a tornado!”
Melba hugs Zeus close. “My caregiver went through so much worse, though,” she says. “I wish they could have warned me. She came back to me after three months, and the first thing I asked about were her kids.”
The caregiver had lost two of her three young children. “They found her little girl right away, age 6,” Melba says. “The little boy, the tornado actually took him down the street, and his father found him and tried to perform CPR. They airlifted him to the hospital. He was brain-dead, so they had to turn off the machine.”
She shakes her head, trying to clear away the image. Outrage distracts her: “I was paying $425 for a two-bedroom house, and now people are charging $650 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. The wealthier people with the nice homes, all of them had insurance, and their homes are going to be fixed. Except for injuries, of course—this tornado wasn’t choosy. It took away the poor; it took away the rich. But it took away all the dilapidated pieces of crap we’ve been living in, and when they are rehabbed, the rent will be sky-high.”
She shrugs, resigned. “FEMA’s been fabulous. It’s just being in such close quarters with so many people,” she says. “One night, there was this little fellow in an electric wheelchair, doing wheelies in our driveway. What the heck? And when I got out there, there were two police cars, and five minutes later, along comes this yellow Pathfinder, and as soon as the driver saw the police, she whipped into this driveway and squealed out. So of course the police followed her.”
Was she there to sell drugs, perhaps? “Oh yeah.”
A few rows down, a woman who won’t give her name nods toward a neighbor’s torn blinds. “All they would have to do is call maintenance,” she says. “They don’t, because they can’t let anybody see what’s in their houses.”
Prostitution’s common, too, she says: “The women walk around in lacy short skirts.” Because there’s a captive audience? “Because nobody’s got bills. No rent, no utility bills. People are supposed to be saving to start over, but…”
She sighs. This trailer village has jammed together Joplin’s drug dealers, its struggling single parents, and its middle class—everybody but “the richies” who’ve already restored their private normalcy. In her old neighborhood, she says wistfully, “Everybody mowed their lawns at the same time, and we didn’t argue. As soon as you realize something is good, it’s gone.”
The tornado showed just how courageous and generous—and how resourceful—people can be. More than 551 tons of debris were recycled immediately afterward. Broken chunks of cement have been pulverized and remixed to pour new foundations, tires ground into fuel or playground cover, hacked-off tree limbs made into wood pellets and used as fuel, for landscaping, or to cover the rising landfill, “so birds and animals don’t come and feast on the leftover Happy Meals and when it rains, it doesn’t run into a big gooey mess,” says Mary Ann Phillips, Joplin’s recycling coordinator.
The tornado’s also shown just how low people can sink.
By September, the Missouri attorney general’s office had received about 550 complaints. Mortgage lenders taking their sweet time releasing insurance money. Charity scams. Skyrocketing rents. Price gouging. Contractors starting home repairs, then leaving without finishing them. State Attorney General Chris Koster obtained restraining orders against towing companies who were towing without authorization, then billing the wrecked car’s owner. He filed suit against two men, one based in Puerto Rico and the other in Georgia, for fraudulently soliciting donations. He sued a landlord who’d raised rents by 16 and even 25 percent, informing tenants that unless they contacted him, their unit would be leased to someone else in three days.
Legal Aid of Western Missouri handled similar cases for individuals, including a couple whose landlord had put all their stuff out on the sidewalk in the pouring rain—even though their rent was paid up. “He thought he was going to get some money from FEMA, then even more if he rerented at a higher price,” says managing attorney Janice Franklin, acid in her voice. “We also had a couple clients who’d had custody of their children. Their ex said, ‘Let me help,’ and took the kids until the mothers got back on their feet. Then the exes said, ‘Oh, too bad, I’m keeping the kids.’”
What bothered Keegan Tinney were the voyeurs. “Right after it happened, people were taking almost family trips to Joplin: ‘Let’s load up and go see where it happened.’ There were people out there with cameras—it was ridiculous,” he says. “A lot of them weren’t local, either. It was like the looters—you’d see Kansas and Oklahoma license plates. It offended me.”
Two sun-browned, grizzled men, laden with backpacks and satchels, walk up Eighth Street, heading for the limestone church at 812 S. Pearl. “We’re storm chasers,” John Wewer announces proudly. “I did the Dallas–Fort Worth tornado, and then the hailstorms in Galesburg, Ill., and Abilene and Lubbock, Texas.” He’s from Tulsa, Okla., and his new pal, Wesley Couverler, is from Arkansas. They’re looking for work rebuilding, they say—but first, they’re trying to find some food.
The church they’re beelining for is St. Peter the Apostle Catholic Church. But its pastor, the Rev. J. Friedel, is trying to do a different kind of rebuilding. Rusty and Edie Howard were his parishioners. The night of the tornado, Rusty brought Harli, their 5-year-old daughter, and Hayze, their 19-month-old son, to McAlister’s Deli so they could eat with Edie on her dinner break from Freeman Hospital. She kissed them goodbye and drove back to the hospital, her car rocking in wind so hard, she called Rusty and urged him to get the kids into a shelter. He drove to Home Depot and ran to the door, his arms around his children. Employee Dean Wells came to unlock the doors—and the walls collapsed, crushing Wells, Rusty, Hayze, Harli, and three others under a 50-ton concrete panel.
If the Howards had stayed at the restaurant, they would have been fine.
Now, Friedel’s supposed to answer when Edie asks, “Where was God in all of this?” And all he can say is “Right there at Home Depot with them. God does not abandon us in our suffering.” He refuses to believe, as some do, that the tornado was a deliberate “act of God.” “If you try to make sense out of this, you’ll go crazy,” he tells Edie gently. “All we can do is hurt and hang onto each other and love each other. There’s no way I can explain this pain.”
Nor can he explain why he survived, huddled in the church basement trying to explain to a frightened young priest from India just what a tornado was. At 6 p.m., Friedel said the fastest Mass of his life, telling parishioners that if they had loved ones on Range Line Road, they should go check on them. But he didn’t realize the damage’s extent until after Mass, when he found out St. John’s had been hit. Ten minutes later, he was at McAuley Catholic High School, using an office chair as a makeshift wheelchair for triaged patients.
Later, he learned that St. Mary’s, Joplin’s other Catholic church, had been completely destroyed. “Here I am, 12 blocks out of the strike zone,” he says, wincing. “I am not about to suggest to the people of St. Mary’s it’s because God likes us better.”
At Saint Paul’s United Methodist Church, a geometric grid of steel protects a cross that’s maybe 40 feet tall. It looks like a contemporary art installation.
“Actually,” the Rev. Aaron Brown says, “that’s our steeple. That big slab behind it was our worship space.”
He’s youngish, mild as Mister Rogers, with the same intelligent glint in his eye. Wearing dark jeans and a gray shirt, he’s spending his day, as usual, talking with contractors, asking insurance agents to “do us justice,” and trying to help the 99 families in his church who lost loved ones or homes. “If they didn’t lose a friend or family member, just their home or business, they will tell you they are blessed,” he says.
And if they only lost a home, often they feel guilty.
“Part of my job is to reframe survivor’s guilt,” he says. “Name that feeling for what it is—compassion, a sense of grief for other people—and then channel that, let it motivate you to do something for somebody else.”
His friend Barbara Bilton, executive director of the Community Clinic, struggled with those feelings for weeks. “It was very, very difficult to feel like you didn’t deserve it,” she says. “You just kept wondering why you lived—why me? Why am I the lucky one?”
Few in the congregation are suffering as much as Will Norton’s father. When the tornado took Will, his father tried to hold onto his son’s body with every ounce of strength he had, breaking bones and severing an artery. But he couldn’t save his son.
“We live in this imperfect world,” says Brown. “It’s broken. It’s unpredictable. God never ever promised to protect us from harm. God’s promise is, ‘I will be with you during the storm.’ And one of the amazing things about God is, he never lets pain go to waste. He can take that pain that comes from tragedy and make good things come from it.”
Joplin’s trying. “We’re facing a year of firsts,” Brown says. The first Halloween in a shattered city; the first Christmas; 162 birthdays and dozens of anniversaries. You have to brace for those firsts, or they will broadside you. Even navigating the city holds grief: A familiar landmark’s gone, and people have already forgotten what was at that spot. “There are those little moments of grief all the time,” Brown says. “And there are little celebrations, too. It’s a boost to my inner world when I see the frame of a house go up or a business open its doors.”
He looks away, his eyes softening. “For weeks, our 5-year-old’s play revolved around being a tornado victim. She would pretend she was a little girl whose family died in the tornado and she had moved in with us.” Her older sister, 11, spent the night of the tornado calling his cellphone: “Daddy, come home!” “Daddy, come home!” He’d gone out to help, and she was hearing the newscasters caution people not to leave their homes. But because communications were down, he never heard her messages.
Now, when he tries to tell her everything will be OK, she looks him straight in the eye and says, “No, it won’t.”
“You’re wrong,” he says gently. “It will. We’re here. We have each other.”
Those irreparably damaged are those who were most vulnerable before the tornado—who were already unemployed or financially on the edge, or whose relationships were already fractured.
At the Community Clinic, which serves anyone who’s uninsured, the waiting room’s still crammed, six months after the tornado. Visits are up 30 percent, but the same staff’s managing the caseload, and two of the seven lost their homes.
“They couldn’t concentrate; they’d be talking to you and just turn around and walk off,” says Bilton. Or they’d sit and stare, dazed, unable to joke or even register what was going on around them. It took at least four months, she says, before they began to converse and joke normally again.
As for the patients, “We’re finding a lot of people who are angry, noncompliant,” she says. “Their blood sugar may be very high, and they say, ‘I don’t care.’ That’s their only remaining power.” Normally, the clinic might make a single domestic-violence referral each year; since the tornado, it’s already made four. Anxiety’s up; depression’s up.
Valetta Tsangaris, who was caught in the bank drive-through with her husband and daughter, saw bodies dead in their vehicles or flying through the air. Three months after the tornado, she was driving home from work, saw a drop of rain, and, in her husband’s words, “flipped out, sped home, and called me in tears. Which was a big improvement—because a month before that, she wasn’t capable of driving by herself at all.”
“Time seems to be the only thing,” he says. “No matter what you’re doing, it’s like the back of your mind has to be working through it. You can’t shock yourself into being fine again, and you can’t hide yourself into being fine. You just have to do what you normally do.
“It’s an adventure,” he finishes, his tone half awe, half sarcasm. “It’s not one we would have chosen. But it’s our reality now.”
The day after the tornado, working on little sleep and with some of their own houses destroyed, administrators and teachers at Joplin Schools began trying to find their students. “It was daunting,” says Joplin High principal Kerry Sachetta. Facebook helped the staff locate about two-thirds. “Every day, the number got smaller in terms of how many we were finding.”
Debbie Fort, Irving Elementary School’s principal, remembers thinking, when she saw the 84-year-old elementary school in ruins: “There’s no way all of the kids could have survived this.” Irving’s teachers used a dry-erase board to track the names of students. When every student in a grade level was accounted for, they drew a smiley face. By Tuesday, May 24, they’d managed to find every student. A teacher scribbled across the board, “Thank you, Jesus!”
In total, seven students and one staff member in the district had been killed. More than 4,200 students had been affected.
On May 27, administrators began shifting gears. Six of the district’s 19 school buildings had been destroyed, and three others were significantly damaged. They had 12 weeks to create learning space for more than 50 percent of the district. Irving Elementary moved to a vacant former elementary school, East Middle School went to a 50,000-square-foot warehouse at an industrial park, and Joplin High School’s juniors and seniors moved to a place where they already spent much of their free time: Northpark Mall.
At first, people joked that students would be shopping or hanging out at the arcade. Working around the clock with architects and contractors, however, educators gave a former department store a small gym, offices, and classrooms. On the outside, they painted the school’s mascot, a bald eagle.
The transition cost a reported $30 million, but Joplin’s schools reopened Wednesday, August 17, just as superintendent C.J. Huff had promised.
“Our community needed that desperately,” says pastor Brown. “It said, ‘We will not be pushed down; we are not defeated.’ If your kids are learning and there’s a routine, that’s a big chunk of normalcy.”
Behind the schools, rows of concrete-and-steel tornado shelters lined the parking lots. Administrators brainstormed about spatial challenges, like where to host a high-school homecoming rally. And extra counselors were brought in to help students who were still coping with the experience. “Just this morning, a little girl froze in her tracks and was hugging herself,” principal Fort says in mid-September. Some kids grew hysterical over small accidents, experienced nightmares, struggled to concentrate in the classroom.
Little things helped, like Friday-night football games at Joplin High. At Irving Elementary, the walls were lined with cheerfully drawn trees—now largely missing in Joplin. Outside the former high school, artists carved eagles from tree stumps. Somebody added two new letters to the damaged school sign with duct tape, so it read Hope High School.
“I don’t necessarily know if that will be the name of it,” says Sachetta, “but that will definitely be what we’ll have.”
The week after the tornado, city manager Mark Rohr worked 121 hours, dealing with fire and police departments, state and federal officials, the National Guard and FEMA.
The next week, crews began removing the debris, guided by the Army Corps of Engineers. If the estimated 300 million cubic yards of debris—a debris field twice the size of the World Trade Center site—was cleared by August 7, FEMA would pay for 90 percent of the work. Each morning at 6, men from the Workforce Investment Board came in on buses to help clean up. To speed the process, the city set a 60-day halt on any residential construction—a move criticized by some citizens who were eager to rebuild.
“You don’t want to react so quickly that you miss out on an opportunity,” says Troy Bolander, the city’s planning and community development manager, explaining that the moratorium provided more time to search for funding. “But you don’t want to move so slowly that people leave town.”
While the debris was being cleared, utility crews from across the nation worked to restore power. Within two weeks, most citizens had electricity. The chains popped back first. Home Depot opened a makeshift lumberyard in a tent near its former building, and Walgreens and Chick-fil-A started rebuilding immediately. Joplin residents crowded into each grand opening, grateful to have bits of normalcy restored.
Allen Pendergrast stands at the site of his father’s demolished donut shop, Dude’s Daylight Donuts, checking the footings for the new building. “We didn’t have the shop insured,” he says. “Fortunately, Dad had his house insured.” Durard “Dude” Pendergrast and his wife lived right behind the beloved donut shop, famous for its glazed donuts and maple bars. The tornado took both home and shop, and regulars have vowed that no donut will pass their lips until Dude’s reopens.
“Dad said he built the first one, I can build the second,” Allen says. “We’re trying to bring it back as close to the original as possible, to make sure anyone who walks in isn’t shocked.” He waited a restless six weeks for the new construction permits. “I didn’t realize how much I liked to make donuts until I stopped. My wife and I went down to Tulsa to check out some new equipment, and they had batter all ready for me. I got down there and started frying, and it was almost an emotional experience.”
For many small-business owners and residents, progress creeps along. Some found it tough to let go of their belongings when demolition began in mid-August. Others struggle with endless forms from insurance and mortgage companies, FEMA and the Joplin Public Works Department. (Insured losses are estimated to top $2.2 billion.)
Still, many residents have decided to stay. By mid-September, 88 percent of displaced citizens were living within a 25-mile radius of the city, says Bolander.
In community forums, residents have started to dream. They’ve talked about bike trails, green space, fiber-optic Internet, mixed-use development, underground utilities. Some have pointed to examples in other cities like Greensburg, Kan., a town that was decimated by a tornado in 2007 and rebuilt as a model of sustainability, with actor Leonardo DiCaprio producing a TV series that documented the process.
But Joplin isn’t Greensburg.
“There’s a little bit of a libertarian strain in Joplin,” explains Rohr. “They don’t necessarily want a government entity dictating everything in their lives.”
There also is the issue of funding. Take underground utilities, for instance: “Anything is possible,” says Brill. “It’s a cost, and FEMA won’t absorb it because FEMA always asks you to take it back to the way it was, and that would be an enhancement.”
The city also has to clean up lead contamination, which is far more extensive and expensive than they’d anticipated, and somehow restore low-income housing. The tornado ate a significant portion of Joplin’s rentals and small houses. “Some of those are probably not going to come back,” says Bolander. Unable to rebuild for less, many former landlords are selling their lots. Homeowners, too, are selling to developers who plan to build more upscale subdivisions. The pace of land transactions in Joplin has reportedly tripled since the tornado.
The rush of activity is hard for Bolander to track, but it’s also meant record highs during an otherwise bleak recession. By early October, construction had topped $131 million, home sales were already double that of the previous year, and unemployment figures were holding steady. Habitat for Humanity was set to build 10 homes before Thanksgiving, and ABC’s Extreme Home Makeover was about to build seven homes in seven days.
Randy Turner, a middle-school teacher and former Joplin Globe reporter who co-authored 5:41: Stories From the Joplin Tornado, is watching all this rebuilding with a close eye. “A lot of people would like to go in the same direction that Greensburg went, and a lot of other people are just very skeptical,” he says. “There are people who have been trying to renovate downtown Joplin for years, and they’ve gotten a reputation, deserved or not, for being kind of elitist, so a lot of people think ‘those people’ are trying to push their radical environmental beliefs on everyone.” Many of the skeptics “would like to see things returned exactly the way they were,” he adds. “A lot of people will always yearn for the old Joplin.”
Jennifer Donaldson is back at work. She’s an administrative assistant at Freeman Hospital’s emergency department—not an easy job after what she endured on May 22. “We have so many people that are having such a hard time dealing with it,” she says. “I wouldn’t tell people the full extent of my story because I didn’t want them to feel like theirs was less important. Everyone has a story to tell.”
And hers didn’t end after the tornado.
While she was in the hospital and off work recovering from her injuries, much of the relief-effort money was distributed to others. When she was able to seek help, she was turned away from several churches because she’d been staying with friends and couldn’t prove her home address, she says. “I’ve been told ‘no’ by so many people, it’s not even funny.” Donaldson slept in the doctor’s lounge at Freeman Hospital, her aunt’s house, her office. Finally, after returning to work in mid-August, she found a small studio apartment.
Nearly six months after the tornado, life’s finally closing in on normal.
“It’s been getting there,” she says. “It gets closer every day.
By Jeannette Cooperman and Jarrett Medlin
