The Misty Manor, Mercers

Updated 3 Times: As most of you know, a deadly tornado struck Joplin, Missouri on Monday 23 May 2011, with an estimated toll of: 8,000 structures, 300 businesses, 4,000 jobs, 1,150 injured and at least 142 lives lost. Our farm is a bit over 30 miles from Joplin and one of the tornadoes touched down just about four miles away. Parts of the St. John's hospital have been scattered over much of the region. We have had medical records turn up in our front yard. Fortunately we escaped the storm system with minimal damage.

This journal is an account of what has been happening in Joplin and what we have been doing with the relief efforts locally. We have started putting photos in an image gallery.

Joplin Tornado Damage Near 20th St. Cathi and I volunteer with the American Red Cross, and, when they did not need us to volunteer at the shelter in Joplin, we went looking for other ways to help. A friend of ours from Pasture Nectar Farm organized a caravan of about 25 volunteers (from the Well-Fed Neighbor Alliance and the Ozark Property Rights Congress) going to the Joplin Family Worship Center, which has become a staging area for supplies and work crews going into the damaged city. We first went out on Friday morning, spent some time working to sort and organize supplies at the JFWC and then joined a crew going out to clear wreckage along 20th St. near Schiffendecker. Our crew contained about 40 people of the over 400 volunteers from 14 states fielded out of that one church that day.

The volunteers brought their own equipment, supplemented by donations to the church: chainsaws, axes, wrecking bars, work gloves, radios, wheelbarrows, towing chains, etc. Food and water were supplied out of the staging area and by other volunteers in the field. There were pallets of bottled water on every street in the downtown area, tent cities springing up with signs like "Free Tool Sharpening Here" and "State Farm Local Claims". Street signs, traffic lights, and landmarks had been erased, so getting to and from the work site was a long and confusing process.
I have seen damage from Fran (VA), Hugo (NC), and other bad storms. I had seen pictures from the news coverage this week. I thought I was prepared for what Joplin would look like. I was wrong. The entire downtown looked quite literally like a nuclear bomb had been dropped, with no recognizable structure for miles. Some areas were heaped in wreckage, others had been swept completely bare except for block or stone foundations. Twisted, leafless stumps of trees stuck up everywhere, decorated with the confetti of cars and homes. We drove over downed power lines which draped the area like a demonic cat had played with a spool of steel yarn. Inexplicably, every so often we would pass a single house or business almost completely intact, including unbroken windows.

At the Work Site: The work site partway through the day. Cathi is standing at right middle-ground.Our crew spent most of the day removing wreckage from one residential lot near the hospital. We cleared perhaps a third of the lot by time we quit in early evening, but we had cleared most of the debris of the garage, allowing the home owners to process the insurance on the truck and car inside, and cleared space for front-end loaders to remove the large chunks of house from the lawn and driveway. The remaining, standing bits of the structure began to be visible from the surrounding devastation. The owners had been lucky enough to have a basement and sheltered in it that night as their house was ripped apart and battered by sections of oak trees which had been standing for all of living memory.

Lisette has been a real trooper throughout, working with other kids to clear small debris and branches, carry water back and forth, and so on. At one point I looked up to see a piece of OSB apparently walking under its own power and found my daughter walking underneath it. (Children do need to be aware of the dangers in the work zone and must be under close supervision and wearing proper gear at all times).
Garage Cleared, Found a Boat: One of our priorities was to clear the garage. Lisette poses in the now uncovered boat.

We went from there to help a nearby home owner get some belongings from the basement of a destroyed home. The higher ground gave us a panoramic view of the city as we stood next to a bus which had been tossed there from the church a quarter mile away with minimal damage. Finally, we loaded our tools and headed back to the staging area for a hot meal, getting confused and separated from our group more than once. We stopped and waited at a corner while thirty Humvees went past, which we later learned were there to pave the way for the President's visit.

Although the situation was... well, a disaster... and one of historic proportions, signs of activity and industry were everywhere. Volunteers were on the ground by the thousands, the majority of them connected with one church group or another (our daughter's godparents were out with over five-hundred volunteers from the Mormon churches on Saturday). Most streets were clear. Many had spray-painted street names on whatever surface was available. We passed temporary cell-towers already put in place by Sprint, utility trucks and linemen from several states, and police/sheriff vehicles from all over Missouri. The Red Cross had its own little tent-city set up and the Salvation Army was active out of two damaged facilities in the downtown. FEMA was notably absent, but no one really cared. We all goggled for a moment as we passed a newly framed building which had sprung up, literally overnight. Even elephants from the circus have been pressed into service clearing damaged vehicles.

Since the first day, we have been back bringing more volunteers from Springfield to help out at the distribution center (mostly sorting huge stacks of baby clothes and taking out trash), and on another work crew out on Jaguar street where we spent the afternoon with chainsaws clearing downed trees and then back to help at the center again. I sat and talked with a gentlemen from Buffalo, NY who had just come back from a different work crew, had been here several days and was getting ready to drive back to New York. A steady stream of people stopped to ask us how to volunteer and how to join the Red Cross.

JFWC Disaster Relief: The Joplin Family Worship Center served as one of the staging areas for relief efforts.The efforts at the JFWC have grown from a space for people to drop supplies and parishioners to report needing help to a full-fledged crisis center with an outdoor kitchen steadily cranking out hot meals and Gatorade for both displaced residents and volunteers, the sanctuary taken over by organized rows of tables and stacks of supplies (with some girls rehearsing for a wedding dance on one end), and the church office wall-papered with little pink and green pieces of paper denoting groups of volunteers and jobs which need doing. The parking lot is full and there is a steady stream of volunteers in and out one door and people needing assistance in and out the other. Semis from all over the US come and empty their cargo. The atmosphere is one of hope. If there is any better use for a church or any better way to worship, I do not know it.

At this moment, we are spending a day to rest and catch up on the farm. Another crew will be caravanning in from Pasture Nectar Farm tomorrow and we will be going if we are sufficiently recovered. The JFWC link above has a continuously updated list of what supplies they need and do not need. If you are not a burly guy with a chainsaw, do not be dissuaded from volunteering (and ignore FEMA, which is saying that volunteers are not needed). All kinds of help are needed to sort supplies, cook, drive, help people find supplies, answer phones, make calls, and organize crews. Even on the work crews, just having people to carry water and keep people hydrated are a blessing in this heat. Large numbers of chainsaws are not needed. We have done well with a mix of about three running saws per 10-12 people. It takes a lot of hands to clear debris ahead of and behind them to keep the saws running. A good machete or two (or long-handled pruners) has been useful to clear dense foliage to be able to get the chainsaw crews in.

More updates as they come in.