Iowa volunteers amazed by scope of damage in Joplin
Andy Swanson walked into the gymnasium at Ozark Christian College shortly after dawn Wednesday, not sure what the day would bring. Maybe he would work for a Red Cross first-aid station, where Swanson, a 61-year-old emergency medical technician at Mercy Medical Center in Des Moines, could treat wounds and help dispense prescriptions. Or maybe he would be part of a three-person condolence team, visiting people who’d lost family members in Sunday’s EF-5 tornado, which killed at least 123 people, a number that could rise in coming days as the 1,500 people reported missing are found – or aren’t. But really it didn’t matter what he did. Like the 100 fellow America Red Cross volunteers and hundreds more disaster-relief volunteers flocking to this southwestern Missouri city of 50,000, Swanson just wanted to help. What these volunteers would see when they reached this tornado’s nearly mile-wide path of destruction was as mind-boggling in its scope as it was head-scratching in its peculiarity. Generations-old trees, completely uprooted and resting on their sides. Roofless houses, covered with tarps and stretching as far as the eye could see – and then, inside one of them, gucci outlet a china cabinet that remained untouched. An electric substation that was now a twisted pile of metal. A street light that was snapped in half, but with an unbroken light bulb inside. A tiny, barking Corgie, running circles around a giant John Deere tractor whose jaws clenched onto a few cubic yards of damaged trees. And block after block of trees, shorn of bark and limbs but still standing tall – perhaps an appropriate metaphor as this city starts to rebuild. In the middle of it all stood Phillip Peck, handing out water and food. Peck is a facilities manager for Postal Federal Community Credit Union. As he walked the blocks of destruction, he was still amazed the local branch of his credit union barely suffered damage, while the nine-story hospital across the street, St. John’s Regional Medical Center, was obliterated. “You can see this on TV, but until you put your feet on the ground and see these crazy things, you realize the force of nature: just a bunch of air molecules going really fast,” Peck said. Day Three of recovery began at first light. Some 1,500 people waited in line for more than two hours Wednesday morning to get a permit to enter the tornado-affected zone. As scores of garbage trucks rumbled down the streets of Joplin, the American Red Cross prepared another batch of 50 trained volunteers. The need was huge. With massive tornadoes and flooding, this season has been the Red Cross’ busiest disaster season since the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a spokeswoman said. A shelter housed 170 people the first couple nights then doubled its capacity to 350 Tuesday night. “In Joplin, everyone is family, everyone knows each other, and we have to be sensitive to their issues,” Marita Wenner, a Red Cross volunteer from Pennsylvania who was in charge of the Joplin operation, told the new group. “We have staff coming in from all over. But all disasters are local. This disaster is going to go on long after these people have left. Twenty years of disaster experience and this is the worst I’ve seen by far.” Disaster relief wasn’t restricted to official volunteers. Amy Rogers, an Ankeny native who now lives in Joplin with her husband and two-year-old son, went house to house on Monday to help with search and rescue efforts. Tuesday night, as another massive thunderstorm rumbled through southwestern Missouri, the family hid in the basement of a high school. On Wednesday morning, she thought back to not even a month ago, when she watched television reports of the destructive tornadoes in Alabama. That seemed so awful, but that seemed so far away. “It’s almost like we’re still in that mindset, not like we’re watching what’s right down the road,” she said.