Reporter returns to hometown devastation in Joplin
JOPLIN, MO. • This is where I fell in love with pineapple and Canadian bacon pizza. It’s where I went to shop for jeans and music at the mall. It’s where I worked at a grocery to help pay for college.
Joplin was my big city. The place to escape from the sameness of small town life 20 minutes away, in Neosho, Mo.
I came back here on Wednesday. I hadn’t been in Joplin since back-to-back trips 18 months ago to attend the funerals of my grandparents, who died less than a month apart.
During those visits, Joplin seemed much the same as I’d left it 25 years ago after graduating from Missouri Southern State University. The city didn’t seem as big or bright but certainly familiar.
All the news accounts I watched did not capture fully the devastation or prepare me for what I saw as I drove through the streets last week, awestruck by the immense power of nature. Driving down 20th Street, I looked for anything to remind me of how it used to be.
One of the few buildings left standing in this part of town was Dillons supermarket, where I once stocked the beer cooler, worked the bakery counter and was invited by my co-workers to parties that lasted until dawn. The building was a battered mess, much of it gone. But at least it was recognizable.
This is getting closer to the information that was missing from other news accounts. Tornadoes are part of the culture of the Midwest. In ten years a person easily deals with hundreds of tornadoes moving through the area in which they live. So what happened here that was different? Well, after a while, even though you still go down in the basement for a tornado warning, you get a sense of the pathways that tornadoes tend to follow. After all, 25 years is 250 tornado warnings. That’s 250 misses. They usually avoid populated areas, traveling to the outskirts of town—having some kind of affinity for trailer parks. And they usually come in the dead of night. This was also different, coming quickly at a time of day when many people were out and couldn’t get to the basement. Still, it’s common to have stories on the school bus of just how close a tornado (on our bus the story of 4 or 5 tornadoes) moved through a vacant lot near our homes, a lot that was about to become I-270.