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Well my experience was I was home on that Sunday afternoon watching the
Cardinals on television play now with my Ipad in my lap
I was watching the local radar and I wish that talking to the National
Weather Service industry are
and about four thirty things seemed to get rather dicey
So I decided it was time to come down to the Emergency Operation Center which is three
miles from my house. I came to the mercy operation center got here about twenty
minutes of… and started watching the weather, talking to the weather service, talking
to our people in the field
talking to Emergency managers to the west of me from Kansas. All across the
Kansas state line
and things pretty much started to deteriorate from there.
At about five-eleven I decided to turn on the sirens because it was obvious that some sort of
Tornado activity was approaching in the city of Joplin and Jasper County.
SOUND: Tornado Sirens
At about seventeen minutes after the National Weather Service
warned on Jasper county in general and the City of Joplin specifically
we turn on the sirens a second time approximately
Around five-thirty
the first record of it touched down was somewhere in the neighborhood of about
Five-thirty-eight to five-forty-one depending on which agency you listened to.
After that things just…
pretty much started to go south. After I turned on the sirens first time
The local radio station called me and Wanted to know why the sirens were on. I was talking
To them and they quit talking. I couldn't understand for a moment with a hung up on me.
Then I realized the cell phone towers were down.
Then, of course, the Phones went down the Cable went down a lot of the
communication lines that we had went down. We had back-up communications but
it took a little while to get back on line
it took probably in the neighborhood of thirty to forty-five minutes to get
everything back up and running
We had generators that kick-on automatically but you have computers
That need to reboot. Electronic systems to come back up.. it takes a little while for them to warm
warm up
Log back into them.
Some things honestly didn’t work. Cell Phones for example. We could do some
texting and the communication via cell phones which is very very sporadic and
in today's world in particular Emergency Management world everybody talks on cell
phones were they sent text back and forth
The phone system that we have here Of courses, is PBX
which we have generators to keep that money but we had many phone lines
that were ripped down so it took awhile for the over the phone lines to be able
to get kicked in
and be able to be uses. We have ham radio
that helped a lot. But then again it's that kind of a point to point thing
it took awhile for the ham ham radio operators
to get up and get dispersed so we could be able to do some communications from
them
Later on we had Satellite Phones and we were able to use. Satellite
communications devices that others brought in and that helped a lot.
The city has a eight hundred megahertz radio system
which by and large was not affected
by that and that we still had our towers we still had a repeaters
but it was uh... it was just totally jammed, Everybody was trying to talk
Same time. We had some problems with the channels and when we've got that
all straightened out and I say probably again with-in that forty-five minutes
time period or so,
we're able to start talking to the State to talk to a lot of the locals as well.
Actually I think that the police department was already on the
field when this happened they were doing some watching of it.
We had two fire stations that were Destroyed.
At the time the one fire station our firefighters went inside the building and
Hid in a small room along with a couple of citizens that came by
their station was knocked down almost flat
The other fire station the crew was out on a call
and had only got back in a very short amount of time and that particular
truck was partially destroyed in their building was destroyed as well
Of courses as soon as that happened we started calling for help.
Other help came in and we have Mutual Aid agreements from
several of the various agencies around the area
and they came and we set up some command centers we setup some staging areas and
then started doing search and rescue.
Probably the biggest thing that we found that we had to deal with was just
understanding the scope
of what had happened.
In the city alone the track was six miles long by three quarters of a mile
Wide, some eighteen hundred acres.
The entire track of the tornado from the city
into Duquesne next door
uh... into the county and the down into Newton County
where it may turn toward Diamond was about thirteen point eight miles.
Yes, we had a lot of people lose their lives the current count we have a
hundred and fifty-nine deaths.
and somewhere in the neighborhood of maybe eleven-hundred injuries.
We're not sure exactly how many people were injured
We lost a major hospital.
We had
helicopters that literally we have one on the pad ready to lift off, Two other
In the air waiting
to land.
We have fixed-wing aircraft coming into the local airport. Medical aircraft, it
looked like LaGuardia with the amount of planes are coming in.
At one point we had ambulances Stacked up a four wide and twenty
Deep that we're standing by to take people and as soon as they got somebody
they took him to the area hospitals
We would get name and that type of thing you know, but it took a long time to do
some searching to see where these people finally wound up because many of them for
the transfer to another hospital.
The fog of war happens all the time. You just have to accept it it's a fact and
It’s like managing cats
you pretty much have to know it’s going to happen and keep your eyes open
And not get too frustrated by it
and once you get the time to calm down. You can start checking with people to
find out what actually happened.
Right now we'd figure approximately Seventy-five hundred different
Structures were destroyed.
Maybe as many as eight thousand Dwellins, although FEMA counts each
individual apartment as a separate dwelling.
some of the neighborhood of five hundred to five hundred and fifty businesses.
we approximate about seventeen thousand citizens were affected
by this tornad when it came through
Housing is scarce at this point. It's a boon for the realtors.
Most any house that can be sold is being sold. I personally know of some
areas… some houses in my housing area
that that house is sold and never put up a sign.
Someone just came by said are you Interested?
Rental property is at a premium trying to find it's very difficult.
What has been a big help is they've come in with manufactured housing.
The problem with that is it just takes a while
to get the structures done right. They have to come in and inspect the trailer court
Property
It has to be brought up to FEMA Standards. They could bring the
Trailer in and they talk to people
to select their candidates. We have some fields that were built
from scratch
but you have to run utilities. So it takes a while to get that done.
At the height of this you could not find a hotel room
within seventy mile radius of the city
well the first thing that we're having to do right now is Debris
Management itself.
W e have some estimated three million tons
of debris
that has to be hauled off and gotten rid of. At this point, on this date we're about
A third plus
plus done with that and we hope to be finished by the first week of August and
getting hold of that debris hauled off. The second thing you have to do is knocked
down structures that simply cannot be rebuild those with one wall or two walls
and there’s a large number of houses that the people just took the insurance
Money and walked away
and for whatever reasons for those houses have to be dealt with in terms of
Nuisance orders and they have to be knocked down and have to be hauled away.
The silver lining in all of thi is, this is a golden opportunity for rebuilding
Effort. I know we need jobs but there's going to be a lot of construction
jobs in the next several years.
The city and the community at large has formed a task force
of concerned citizens, architects, city personnel, business leaders, laity
leaders
that are getting together to talk about what we want to
This area to look like? Do we want parks? Do we want running paths? Do we want schools
in this area? How much of it is going to be residential how much of this going to
be commercial?
this is a chance to change the face of Joplin.
Well it’s all been positive. No we don't Have, at this point, a good idea.
There's no architectural plans or anything like that
everyone wants to look nice
We do want a lot of trees. Goodness we lost so many trees. We
have an arbor
committee
that is coming into do assessments
of our trees. Which ones can be saved which ones can’t and then make recommendations
as to what we should plant and where we should plant them so we can get some
idea of normalcy back where we used to be
Well
two things
One suggest the fact that this is that This was an E5, with
winds in excess of two hundred miles an hour
being able to survive such an event
is a remarkable thing
and is not always the case for people particularly in houses that are quite a
bit older as those were in that there is some seventy-five plus years old.
The other thing it tells me is that
i'm surprised that there aren't as many fatalities
as what we had. I’m talking an area that was maybe seventeen thousand people
now obviously not all of them were home
but with
just shy of a hundred and sixty deaths and maybe true eleven hundred maybe
twelve hundred injuries in population area that could have had as many as
seventeen thousand people that's quite remarkable that it would be those low of
a numbers.