Frequently Frequented

“Which one is it? Which one? Is it Freeman or St. John’s?” I think I may have been practically yelling at the blonde woman on the shuttle.

She had just told everyone on the shuttle, inadvertently—by exclaiming it when she received the call on her phone—that Joplin had been hit a tornado. She then exclaimed that the hospital was destroyed. With only two in town, each had a 50/50 chance.

Not that it mattered. St. John’s gave my grandmother her end of life care; Freeman is where my mother worked, my grandmother worked, where my first child was born.

I attended high school in a small town 18 miles south of Joplin, but I lived out in the middle of nowhere, and we lived closer to Joplin than to Neosho—where I attended school. Between proximity and the fact that Joplin was five times the size of Neosho (and therefore had novelties such as a mall, and movie theaters, and two hospitals, and gasp! a coffee shop) I spent a lot of time in Joplin. It’s one of those places for me where I get confused if people use street names, but if you describe the landmarks, I can feel the muscle memory react as I envision how I’ve driven this road or that thousands of times before.

As I told someone earlier today, it was a place that I frequented. Frequently. We were up there multiple times each week.

When I heard of the tornado—less than thirty minutes after it happened, we were actually on a shuttle heading back from Silver Dollar City to our cabin. My mind was full of thoughts about how I would blog our spontaneous trip out of town (we were about an hour and a half away from Joplin at the time). We had had a wonderful time—a wonderful break from reality for the boys and ourselves alike. Now my mind is filled with nothing but devastation. Anyone from the area can tell you just how much damage was done to the town, just how many important services were completed destroyed, just how absolutely awful the path of tornado was.

A multi-vortex EF4 couldn’t pick a worse place for its path.

The Springfield news reports were scary. I tweeted all that I heard because rumor had it that there was only a US Cellular tower standing, and it was only processing texts and internet at that time. I spent hours on the phone with my mother: cousins accounted for and alive. Aunts and uncles accounted for and alive. Grandparents and siblings and everyone else. People injured. Neighbors with relatives missing. Close friends were okay, and heading in to help. Several houses were destroyed. By this time the storm was hitting us, but its main thrust of energy was already expended—the worst damage was the fact that I couldn’t get internet. I was relying on SMS for tweeting.

I didn’t sleep. I can’t believe that I even have the presence of mind to write this post right now, but hey, I guess I’ll see just how bad it was in the morning—when I read it with fresh eyes.

Here are the things they absolutely must have:

They are going to need your help, and they are going to need it for a long time. Don’t let this fall out of your mind after a week! Many people donate in the first few days, but this will take more than that. The scope and magnitude of the damage is beyond comprehensible, unless you’ve been in a natural disaster like this before. TV and pictures can never do the 360 panorama justice. Think about donating, about volunteering weeks from now, if you are able. This was a very large chunk of a rather large town. It’s going to take a lot of work and time to get it back.

They need blood, and they need it fast! Mainly type O-. If you are O- and you can give blood, give it now. I’ve never seen a blood bank fly the red alert banner marking that they were out of the universal reserve, and I saw too many to count on our way back home this afternoon.

They need our prayers. A vast chunk of Missouri will be dealing with storms for the next few days—including us, four hours’ drive away. More storms are slated to hit the area in the coming days—and this is something they do not need. 

They need us to keep tabs on the recovery as new issues arise. I've been following Joplin, MO Tornado Recovery on Facebook (with 100,000 of my closest friends, it looks like), and I think this has been an excellent repository of info so far. 

These are the things YOU must absolutely have:

You need an emergency plan for your family! Granted, we’ve been discussing emergency plans in a comical way for the last several days, because of the CDC’s recommendations for the zombie apocalypse, and then there was the whole end of the world thing. That being said, tornadoes have hit every one of our 50 states. It could happen. Or, perhaps, you run the risk of some other disaster, like wildfires, or earthquakes or hurricanes. You must have a plan for each, and you must teach your children. You must stick to the plan. This is not something that can be taken lightly.

You need an emergency kit. You can pull guidelines down from the CDC or FEMA, and you can customize it to what works for you. We have an emergency kit—and the bare bones basics (water, batteries, flashlights, etc) are completely worth having on hand in a waterproof tub. I know that these have been tough times as of late, and the added expense is just something many people feel that they cannot do. I so completely get it. I put ours together over the course of several months. Having something on hand if disaster were to strike before you finished up your kit would be better than having nothing on hand because you never felt that you could get the whole thing out of the way. Start with gallons of water for each member of the house. That’s the very first thing you will need.

The hardest part of all of this has been resisting the urge to self-deploy. I want to be down there; I want to help my family and friends. Right now, logically, I know that I would just be in the way. I will wait, and go down later, when I know there will be jobs for volunteers. In the meantime, I will make sure that this does not end up on the back burner for me.