Joplin charts progress two years after twister

JOPLIN, Mo. - Driveways lead to foundations of houses no longer standing, lingering evidence of a tornado that tore through the southern Missouri city two years ago, killing 161 people and injuring more than 1,000.

Mature trees are absent from the neighborhoods hit hardest. The tops are missing from the few trees left standing.

Although the piles of debris the tornado left are long gone, Joplin residents still describe their stories of survival as if the tornado hit yesterday.

Joplin continues to rebuild after the tornado, which struck at 5:41 p.m. on May 22, 2011. It was a Sunday, and many families were headed home from a graduation ceremony for Joplin High School.

The EF5 tornado that destroyed a large part of Joplin ranks as the seventh deadliest tornado in U.S. history and the deadliest tornado since modern record-keeping began in 1950, according to the National Weather Service. The tornado had winds in excess of 200 mph and was a half mile to three-fourths of a mile wide.

The tornado touched down at the western edge of the city limits and ripped through six miles of Joplin, then continued another six miles, with the tornado also causing damage in the city of Duquesne and in rural Jasper and Newton counties, according to the city of Joplin.

“Sometimes it feels like yesterday, especially when they talk about bad weather coming,” said Anita Stokes, who moved into a house on Kentucky Avenue in November 2011 built through Habitat for Humanity of Tulsa. “Two years later, I look out … this southern part of town is so new.”

Stokes lived in a house on Virginia Avenue when the tornado hit. She remembers her son coming home from a nearby grocery store and telling her to go into the bathroom.

They made it to the bathroom door when he pushed her down and laid on top of her to protect her. They eventually made it into the bathroom, where a wall fell on top of them. They both had just a few scratches.

After the storm passed, they could hear crying. Other people shouted their locations and that they were OK, she said.

“I say God was watching over us,” she said. “There was nothing left.”

REBUILDING JOPLIN

Of 7,500 homes damaged or destroyed in Joplin, 84 percent have been rebuilt, Joplin City Manager Mark Rohr said. Ninety percent of the more than 500 businesses hit by the twister were rebuilt.

“There’s a lot of construction going on right now,” Rohr said. “It’s starting to fill in. We expect more development to occur in the near future.”

More than 160,000 volunteers have contributed more than 1 million hours of service in the effort to rebuild Joplin, Rohr said. Rohr describes the outpouring of support the “miracle of the human spirit,” which is also the title of a book he wrote about his experience in the aftermath of the tornado.

“It’s been an incredible process,” he said. “It’s amazing what people have done in response to the needs presented by our town in the aftermath of the storm.”

Rohr shares his experience and the lessons learned in speaking engagements across the country, he said. He reached out this month to Granbury, Texas, after a tornado there killed six people. He sent a team of public-safety employees to Moore, Okla., to assist the city in the recovery and cleanup from a tornado that dropped there Monday afternoon.

“We remember the amount of assistance that we received following the tornado two years ago, and we want to help others as they helped us,” he said in a statement. “We know too well what their community is facing, and we feel an obligation to serve them as they have served us.”

RETURNING TO LIFE

In the 2010 Census, 50,150 people lived in Joplin. Rohr estimates that the city lost 5.8 percent of its population after the tornado. He hopes to exceed the 2010 population count within the next three years.

Sharon Reeve and her husband, John, consider themselves among the lucky ones. They lived in a house on Bird Avenue that was 80 to 100 years old, she said. They sought shelter during the tornado inside a bedroom closet. She can still hear the crashing, roaring, windows breaking and the sound of trees hitting the house.

“We prayed,” she said. “My husband and I told each other, ‘I love you.’ We didn’t know what was going to happen.”

Their house wasn’t blown away, but the tornado lifted it off the foundation and twisted it, Reeve said. The tornado littered the house with glass, bits of debris and water. That first night, they slept on a wet couch and a recliner.

The Reeves took their mattress from the bedroom, turned it upside down and slept each night for at least a week between their couch and recliner.

Through a friend, they found a small duplex, which was smaller than their first apartment, in Neosho, Reeve said. They lived in the duplex for seven months and looked for a house. Another friend had a lot with a foundation where they built a new house in Joplin. They have lived there for a little more than a year.

The most difficult part is not being able to go back to the place they had called home for 40 years, Reeve said. The couple sold the house on Bird Avenue to a man who planned to repair it.

She misses her old front porch and all the trees, she said.

“Things are getting back to a new normal, a new routine,” said Reeve, who recently retired after 39 years of teaching at St. Mary’s Elementary School.

The Catholic school campus and St. Mary’s Catholic School also were destroyed by the tornado. St. Mary’s School moved to a vacant building on the campus of McAuley Catholic High School, and the church has been meeting inside a former hardware store.

St. Mary’s marked the beginning of construction Thursday on a new site for the church and school near the intersection of 32nd Street and Central City Road.

“Within a period of years, we’ll be bigger and better than we were,” Reeve said. “The city leaders are doing a good job of rebuilding and deciding what to build and trying to look ahead. It’s just going to take a long time to really get back on our feet totally as a city.” STILL IN NEED

The greatest need now is replacing housing for individuals with very low income, said Troy Bolander, Joplin planning and community development manager. Housing plans include providing incentives to encourage the housing development for the poor.

“Some people are going to have a lifestyle change, because they were living in a $60,000 home,” Bolander said. “While that was desirable, you just can’t build that for that price.”

Joplin has received $45 million federal Community Development Block Grant money, with $31 million to assist with a variety of housing activities, Bolander said.The federal money provides $12.75 million for the city to provide assistance individuals with purchasing homes.

A second federal grant of $113 million will assist the city in repairing streets, sidewalks and the sewer system, Bolander said.

“It’s very promising at this point in time,” he said. “We’re in pretty good shape.” ‘CLEAN SLATE’

Joplin Schools lost six campuses in the tornado: Joplin High School, Franklin Technology Center, East Middle School, Emerson Elementary School, Irving Elementary School and Old South Middle School, which was vacant at the time of the storm, Superintendent C.J. Huff said. Three other campuses and the administration building had significant damage, Huff said.

More than 3,000 students lived in the path of the storm, and more than 4,200 students were without a school to attend, according to Joplin Schools. Seven students and one staff member were killed by the tornado.

While first priority went to taking care of students and families, Huff quickly set a goal for school to start on time in the fall 2011. That was one of the first major milestones in the effort to rebuild Joplin, Huff said.

The district found temporary locations to house students in warehouses and converted a former department store in the Northpark Mall to house a high-tech campus for 11th- and 12th-graders.

Construction has started on three campuses, which will provide permanent homes for Joplin High School and Franklin Technology Center, East Middle School and the new Soaring Heights Elementary School, and Irving Elementary School. The new facilities will begin opening in 2014.

“We’re showing the rest of the world what we’re made of here,” Huff said. “We owe it to the people who lost their lives in the storm to move on and make it better. We got a clean slate to start from. We have an obligation to make something better out of it.”

While the operation of schools brought hope and a sense of routine, Huff said schools couldn’t have been further from normal when the 2011-12 school year started. He estimated that 1,400students are still receiving assistance for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Recovering from a tornado is a long process, more akin to running a marathon, Huff said, but the last two years have felt more like a sprint.

“We’ve got to slow down a little bit and take stock of where we are,” he said.

LINGERING TRAUMA

Courtney Burns, now 18, survived the tornado inside her home in Duquesne, she said. She had just turned 16 and remembers spending time that day with her best friend and commenting that the clouds looked like plush cotton balls.

The sky grew darker, andher mother yelled for everyone to take cover in a closet.

“We were one of the only houses in the neighborhood left standing,” Burns said. “We were the only light source in the neighborhood.”

Her family gave out blankets, shoes and clothes to the neighbors, Burns said. Everyone in the neighborhood had a blank stare, she sai.

But in the weeks and months after the storm,Burns’ family couldn’t escape the devastation. They would close their windows and blinds at night, making their surroundings appear the same as before the tornado.

“You wake up and look out the window and everything’s gone,” Burns said. “It affected me a lot.”

Burns started using drugs to cope with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, she said. She dropped out of Joplin High School during her 11th-grade year, she said.

She got help during a 10-month stay at a Cooksen Hills Christian Ministry home. She earned a General Educational Development credential, in lieu of her high school diploma.

She’s now working at the Webb City Wal-Mart and plans to begin taking classes in June at Crowder College in pursuit of a career as a dental hygienist.

Burns said the city and school officials have put so much effort into putting the city back together that they overlooked putting the people back together.

“The people still have a lot of emotions to deal with,” said her grandmother Priscilla Brown, a lifelong resident of Joplin. “This tornado season will bring it out.”

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 11 on 05/22/2013

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