Nearly Blown Away, Part 1

The following is my account of events following the May 22 tornado that ripped through Joplin:

Five minutes before we left for church that evening, my cell phone rings.  It’s Dad.

"It looks like there’s a pretty bad storm heading your way."

I pop up the radar on the computer and look over it briefly.  There is a big ugly cell sitting about 20 miles over the border in Kansas, but I’m not worried.  Being a 12 year resident of Joplin and living in the middle of town, I had been lulled into a complacency when it came to tornadic storms.  Nearly every time a tornadic storm crossed the borders of Kansas or Oklahoma into Missouri, they went either north or south of town, giving Carl Junction and Oronogo, or Shoal Creek and Silver Creek compelling reason to take cover.  I tell Dad that we’ll keep an eye on it and we head off to church a couple of blocks away.

About five minutes into my setup for the service, Dad calls again to warn me.  I pop up the radar again and am a little more concerned since it is closer.  I tell him I’ll let him know what happens and that we’ll start watching the radar and out the back of the church.  I turn on KSN and join a couple of my friends out the back to watch the weather.  About 5:35 or so, the sky starts turning dark and green.  I figured out later that the green color associated with bad storms is caused by light refracting off of hail.  Hail, for those who don’t know, is caused by updrafts blowing water droplets so high up that they freeze.  They get heavy, fall, and are blown up by drafts again and again, thus giving the ringed appearance when cut open.  A good indicator of a storm with power, and it was putting on a good show that day.

The tornado sirens sound, and we start pulling people into a back room away from the windows in the front of the building.  There is a lot of nervous energy floating around, just begging to be broken loose.  About five minutes later, the sirens sound again, and I hear someone shout, "There’s a tornado down on 20th Street!" 20th street is about six blocks from where we were, and two blocks from our home.  Tina starts crying.

"Elvis! He’s outside!" Elvis being our dog.

"We can’t go," I try to tell her, "we’re safe here!"

She starts crying harder, and I melt. Much against my better judgement I have her give me the keys to the car that we drove.  I’m running out the front of the building and she is grabbing me wanting to go with me.

"No, I can move faster by myself. Stay here."

I run out the front door and locked it.  I run around the side and jump in the car.  As I am pulling out from the church, street lights start to flicker.  I floor it the four blocks home, bottoming out once on my street.  I pull into the alley behind my house to grab the dog and as I step out of the car, I hear the sound that nearly stops my heart.

A lot of people compare the sound of a tornado to a freight train.  If you’ve ever sat at a railroad crossing as a line of diesel locomotives pass by, straining under the weight of 80 or so fully loaded cars, then the sound and vibration is pretty comparable.  It sounded like standing in the middle of a vast forest with a strong wind whipping through.  Later on that week, I would say that it sounded like horror, like the gates of Hell being thrown open.  It sounded huge, and mean, and unstoppable.

I heard that sound and immediately knew that I wouldn’t make it back to the church.  I looked to the west and just saw a dark blue wall of cloud with a few thin wisps of cloud spiraling upward, and the air was dead still except for that noise.  I locked the car door, grabbed the dog, and ran inside while dialing Tina.  I barely had enough time to make it to the closet before the winds picked up and all hell started breaking loose.  Tina answered, crying, and I told her that I was at the house with the dog and that I wouldn’t be able to make it back. As we’re talking, things start slamming against the house, and I hear the window in the bathroom break. 

"I hear things breaking. I’m going to try and call my parents. I love you. Goodbye."

As the noise grew louder, I thought that this was going to be my day to move on from this life. I tried unsuccessfully to dial my parents to tell them that I loved them. After several attempts, I just gave up and started crying and praying in the closet. All I remember saying is "Please, God. Please, God."

It was really only a minute, which is an hour when you are waiting for a piece of debris to fly through the wall and impale you or waiting for the roof to get sucked off. I finally heard the sound move off and the winds die down and I was so relieved.  I started to feel nauseous and my sides hurt from the adrenaline that had just pumped through my body. 

I got a phone call from someone at the church asking if I was alright.  I told him that I was okay and as I surveyed the house, I was relieved to find minimal damage.  Mostly broken storm windows, with the exception of the bathroom window which had broken through on the top pane.  A lot of damage was confined to the north side of the house, which my back had been to through the duration of the storm since we don’t have any interior rooms in our house.  I wanted to leave to go back to Tina, but a second storm picked up, throwing wind, hail, and lightning, so I couldn’t leave for another 20 minutes, after which I loaded the dog up and went back to the church.

From that point, we were pretty much in an information vacuum, as we didn’t have power, internet, and the cell service had gone completely to crap.  It can be a bit chaotic when your only means of communication is half destroyed, taxed and overwhelmed.  The best luck I had was with sending text messages, but that would only work in five minute blocks.  We started hearing reports of St. John’s getting hit, how the whole top floor, including the NICU had been swept off.  Then we start hearing about things further on down 20th street, closer to Rangeline. 

I was in a great deal of shock as my brain struggled to process everything that was going on.  My pastor had run to our main church campus because a friend of ours had called him screaming from the parking lot.  Our main church, not the one Tina and I were at, is close to the hospital on 26th Street. Across the street is a bunch of houses, where this friend’s parents lived.  The neighborhood was leveled.  The sanctuary of the church was completely blown out, while most of the rest of the church was intact.  It’s a testament to the weird kind of damage these storms can do.

As I process this information, I, for some reason, start calculating the statistics of the death toll in my mind.  The area that was hit was almost entirely residential, filled with homes and apartment complexes.  Between 15th and 20th on Rangeline is a very busy place at 6:00 on a Sunday.  With Academy Sports, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, I start feeling like the death toll is going to break 500, if not 1000.

Tina and I go home and get our windo

w patched up and hike down to a local drug store to see if we can volunteer to help find people. By then, it’s night time, and they turn us away simply because it was too dangerous.  We try to walk a few blocks down to check on a co-worker of mine who lived on the same street and don’t get very far.  In the darkness, I can barely make out a house that had been picked up off of its foundation and dropped.  It just sat there, like a crumpled can.  We finally turned around, went home, and turned on KZRG, which was our only source of information for several days. 

At that point, our gas had been shut off due to gas leaks in the area.  Our electricity was out as well, and we were under a boil order for our water.  To say we were ill-prepared is an understatement.  That night, we just sat and listened to the radio in stunned silence.  I told Tina my story, and finally around one laid down in bed to try to sleep.  No AC meant we had the windows open, and for most of the night, all I could hear was the sirens of emergency services racing through town.