This summer, Wellshire's youth group will head to Joplin, Missouri to work alongside TeamEffort in the rebuilding work after last year's devastating tornado. It's hard to imagine the destruction without some context and a first-hand account. This is where God is calling Wellshire's young people this summer.The following are excerpts from Seth Fletcher’s article in this month’s Popular Science magazine*. A native of Joplin, Missouri, Fletcher recounts his experiences in hearing the news and going home to witness it first-hand…
On May 22, 2011… Just after 5 p.m., two storm chasers driving toward the western edge of Joplin, Missouri, spotted a translucent set of tendrils reaching down from the storm’s low black thunderhead… A dark blob half a mile wide congealed and dropped from the clouds. As it touched the ground, it filled with sparks from ruptured power lines, like a jar of fireflies. At 5:41, the National Weather Service in Springfield, Missouri, issued this alert: NUMEROUS REPORTS OF TORNADO ON THE GROUND WEST OF JOPLIN AND POWER FLASHES.
By the time it reached the city limits [of Joplin], where 49,000 people lived, it had evolved into an EF-5, the most destructive type of tornado on the Enhance Fujita scale... An EF-4 is powerful enough to scrape civilization off the planet in a matter of minutes. And EF-5 is more powerful still.
When the storm hit Joplin, the winds inside the funnel were spinning faster than 200 mph – yet the whole column was crawling forward at less than 10 mph, giving it time to wood-chip everything beneath it. The tornado produced a good deal of incredible, EF-5-worthy damage in the office park that surrounded St. John’s Hospital, one of the region’s major medical centers. In 45 seconds, it shifted the nine-story structure four inches off its foundation.
By then, the tornado was three quarters of a mile wide… the tornado hit Joplin High School… Security cameras intended to monitor lunch-hour skippers now recorded surges of water that rendered the parking lot indistinguishable from a harbor in a hurricane…
The tornado churned on to the east, tagging its path with bizarre signatures – wood piercing asphalt, rubber piercing wood… It continued toward the main thoroughfare, Range Line Road, and destroyed a Home Depot, an Academy Sports & Outdoors, a Wal-Mart and a Pizza Hut, shotgunning shoppers with glass and metal and wood, burying some beneath cinder blocks, and needling others with blades of grass…
[Watching the news, that night]
At first we thought the [news] crew was filming outside the town, in the country. A couple of houses down? Not so bad for late May in Missouri. Then the camera turned and landed on St. John’s Hospital. Windows blasted out, every surrounding structure demolished, it looked like the backdrop from a high-budget zombie movie… On camera, Bettes [a network on-camera meteorologist] choked up, turned his head, and broke into tears. That’s when [my wife and I] freaked out…
No phone calls were getting through… it wasn’t until morning that we realized that the damage reports that had been streaming in over Facebook weren’t isolated. One continuous stream of demolition connected them all. The tornado destroyed 20 percent of the property in Joplin, killed 161 people, and injured 1,150 more, all in a town with just 49,000 residents. [Other tornado events have led to higher death tolls, but this was prior to modern warning systems and the result of multiple tornadoes in one system.] The Joplin tornado is the deadliest single tornado on record…
[A higher percentage than normally reported deaths occurred in large retail stores.] Home Depot said that its Joplin store, which was demolished in the storm, was built properly and that no building could have survived the tornado – but it also said the company will be adding an underground storm shelter to its new store…
[On arrival in Joplin the next day]
Debarked trees, blond like treated lumber, splintered the horizon… the terrain was too disfigured to trigger many memories.
The town was so unrecognizable that one of the first tasks workers undertook, after clearing the streets of rubble, was painting street names onto the pavement at every intersection. The signs were gone, as were the landmarks, and even lifetime residents were finding it difficult to navigate…
Search-and-rescue crews had spray-painted the sides of houses with tic-tac-toe-looking code that indicated that a house had been checked for bodies. Many were marked with a final message: “OK to Doze.”
[The tornado] destroyed 6,954 homes and caused at least $3 billion in damage… Dump trucks would cart away some 1.5 million cubic yards of rubble… Elderly couples who hadn’t moved in 50 years were buying new homes sight unseen. Houses in Joplin are generally cheap and abundant, but now there weren’t enough to go around…
The [weather warning] system gave the people of Joplin 24 minutes of warning – enough notice to qualify the Joplin storm as well warned…
[In the following days]
One night at my dad’s, a neighbor who had spent the evening of the tornado volunteering in an emergency room described an array of horrors: an elderly woman, fully conscious, whose scalp was peeled back, exposing her skull… Still-living victims who emergency workers decided to black-tag, leaving them to their death so they could devote their limited time and resources to helping people who had a chance of surviving…
This is where the youth are headed to help in the rebuilding and healing of a community. If you’d like to read more accounts or stories about Joplin, go here:
*February 2012 www.popsci.com
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