The Town of Joplin was Destroyed by an EF-5 Tornado in 2011: This is Joplin’s Story—a Story of Loss, Love, and Hope

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. There are some of our favorites. On May twenty-second, twenty-eleven, the city of Joplin, Missouri, was decimated by the costliest tornado in American history. It took one hundred and sixty-two lives and injured thousands. The tornado left a permanent scar on the Joplin community. Joplin has now since rebuilt in a magnificent way, with the scar—well, it remains here. To tell the story of loss and love in Joplin is meteorologist Jeremiah Cook and Gretchen Bolander. And we’re telling this story because on this day in history, in twenty-eleven, the city of Joplin, Missouri, was struck.

Here’s Jeremiah.

As far as who I am, I’m a Southwest Missouri farm boy. I love Southwest Missouri. I am convinced that when the work of saving humanity is done and God retires, he is going to retire in Southwest Missouri. There’s just no place like it on Earth. I think. That’s part of what made it so much fun to be a journalist and a weather anchor. Here was, I was getting a chance to tell the stories and predict the weather for my family, for the people I grew up with.

This was not just another place to work.

This was my home.

My wife used to joke that I was married to her, but the weather was my mistress, and honestly, I guess that kind.

Of was true.

I loved the problem of trying to figure out.

What the weather was going to do.

You know, when you look at the news desk, there’s four people on the news desk. Three of them are telling you what has already happened, and one of them is trying to figure out what’s going to happen. I wanted to be that guy that was trying to outsmart Mother Nature, if you will. The day of the Joplin tornado, on one hand, it was the best day. I mean, and it’s.

Weird because sitting here thinking about it.

On one hand, the number of people that I’ve heard say that, you know, we were able to save their lives. They took our warnings seriously. That their kids are here today because of what we did. Their grandkids are here today. They’re here today. And my wife was pregnant with our child at the time. Two weeks to the day later, she gave birth to our first child. She was at home in the path of the tornado, and she was watching, and.

She’s here today because she took what I.

Was saying on TV seriously, and so is my daughter and now my son. But at the same time, that was also kind of the worst day. That’s it: it is the kind of hellscape I hope I never have to walk through again.

So it was a Sunday, and Sunday is a day off for me. I did not see anything in the hours leading up to it that made me feel like I needed to come into the station. And you have to understand that a lot of times we have a tornado touchdown in the area, and there’s so much rural area around here that, you know, unfortunately, it may be a farmer is affected, you know, a barn could be lost or some cattle. But the vast majority of touchdowns in our area don’t affect a population center, which, of course, worse is going to be the highest priority. So I don’t remember anything of an HR. I remember being outside probably within half an hour of the touchdown, and the sky was blue with a few clouds. It was a beautiful day. I was outside and having conversation and just enjoying the day.

Honestly, there’s not a lot that happens on Sundays in this area. At the time, I was the weekend weather anchor, so obviously I would do the weather for the ten o’clock newscast.

I also worked as a reporter on the weekends.

But I had pre-shot and pre-edited all my stuff, and I had some overtime, so the news director was gonna let me take the afternoon off and come in that evening. But with severe weather, I mean that trumps everything. When they issued the first warning, I was actually over at a friend’s. We had just set down. I think we were playing John Madden.

Football, and in fact, I think I was winning.

But anyway, I got the phone call that they had issued that warning. As I recall, I want to say that we thought the threat was more Central Arkansas, so I left. I came to the station, and to be honest with you, for the first couple hours, it was just a run-of-the-mill event, something, you know. It was nothing we hadn’t done ten thousand times before. Other than, the storm moved really, really slowly. There were times the National Weather Service would put out updates and it was moving.

You know, one mile per hour. Outside of that, it was.

It was nothing that I hadn’t done dozens, if not hundreds of times in the twelve years of my career leading up to that.

Nature had other plans, and we.

Have this one, this one pesky cell that fires up in Labette County about sixty miles due west to Joplin or so. And I’ll tell you, it got a little frustrating because it just did not move. It was kind of meandering around Parsons, and they finally put out a tornado warning on it, and from the radar returns, it looked like it was just.

Raining, like you wouldn’t believe.

And then when it finally started to move, we all thought, “Okay, finally this is gonna get going.”

It’s gonna get out of the area, and we can get back to business as usual. But it kept moving, and it picked up speed, and it made a beeline for Joplin.

And you’ve been listening to Jeremiah Cook and Gretchen Bolander, both of whom are on duty at KSNF Channel Sixteen in Joplin, Missouri, and you’re hearing the story of the Joplin Tornado, and my goodness, as Jeremiah said, one pesky storm cell fired up sixty miles out of Joplin and started heading right our way. When we come back, more of the story of Joplin and the tornado that changed everything here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American Stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy-six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American Stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we returned to Our American Stories and the story of the Joplin Tornado. Here again is Jeremiah Cook, the weatherman on duty at the time of the storm, and current chaos, and F reporter Gretchen Bolander.

Let’s continue with the story.

Station two on Cobby.

National Weather Service said there was some small rotation on the west side of Joplin, Black Cat, and.

Twentieth Street area.

We had an anonymous phone called: two funnel clouds in a low wall land area, and then they hung out.

I remember when the warnings came down.

I was sitting there in the studio.

We were live on air, and I was talking about what we were seeing on the Doppler radar, and then one of the camera operators in the studio started snapping their fingers and waving their hands, and they pointed over at one of the monitors.

It was our tower camera, and.

I looked at it, and I thought, “Man, I know what that is.”

I should know what that is.

But, you know, sometimes when you see something and you know what it is, but you see it out of context, and it’s like your mind refuses to recognize what it is.

That was that moment.

I had seen tornadoes dozens of times in person, and gosh, I hate to even think about the number of hours of video I’ve seen with tornadoes in them. But for some reason, it’s like my mind was refusing to acknowledge that was a tornado. And there was about a second and a half of, “Oh, my God, what do I do now?” And I remembered some advice my dad had given me.

Dad always said, “Do something.”

Just do something, and you’ll figure out how to make it the right thing. And I just started talking what we were seeing, where it was headed, what we could tell from it. I remember seeing these flashes at the bottom of it, and I thought at first those are lightning strikes, but it quickly became apparent that it was the tornado hitting power lines and hitting transformers and hitting houses.

And that was like the moment when reality came crashing.

Down. Like that was the nightmare moment.

You spend all this time preparing yourself. You spend all this time studying. You spend all this time trying to figure out how do you stop this from happening. It’s like being in a horror movie and realizing you’re powerless to stop the monster. It’s coming for the people you love, and there is nothing you can do about it. There was a point that day where I didn’t know if my wife was still here, my mom and dad, my sister’s husband, a police officer with Joplin Police Department. I’ve got friends all over town. All these people are in the path of it, and when I started talking again, I was just praying that I was talking to them, that I was telling them that this is happening, get.

Out of the way, find shelter, do something.

I was just hoping to God.

That they were watching, that they were seeing what I was seeing, and that we were going to get the message through to them. You know, it’s a heck of a thing trying to, trying to hold it together emotionally in a moment like that. But you just do it.

You just, you act and you move.

You know. We got in the crawl space, so we’re pretty insulated from hearing and certainly seeing anything. And the reports that we continued to get at that point said that there may have been a touchdown on the northern outskirts of town from one source that we had heard, which was a very unpopulated area. So again, I started to think, “Well, maybe something’s happened.” And then on my particular block, there was no impact other than the weather had start, started to get cooler. It took a few minutes before I started to hear from anybody who was concerned that Joplin was in bad shape.

You could have filled a library full of books with what we didn’t know in that moment, and I doubt you could have filled a notepad with what we did know.

Even I would find out later, even city leaders didn’t know how bad it was at that point because it was getting dark. It was hard to get around. It was hard to kind of get arms around it. So I had actually seen bad damage, but it didn’t look like H five damage.

It was an EF five. That’s the top end. Those are, those are the bad boys.

I want to say that the path of destruction was around fifteen, fifteen and a half miles in length and three quarters of a mile wide. The wind speeds were around two hundred and sixty miles an hour. You don’t think about two hundred and sixty mile-an-hour winds. That’s two hundred and sixty mile-an-hour winds. That’s like saying a trillion dollars. I think it’s a number that’s hard for somebody to fathom. You know, if you’ve ever been in a car driving down the road at fifty miles per hour and you put your hand outside the window and feel how hard it is to keep your hand in one spot. I mean, take that and multiply it by five, and that’s what was happening, and not just in one little bitty spot, but in a three quarter of a mile wide area. But at that moment, nobody knew it was an F, nobody knew how wide it was, nobody knew how bad the damage was. So they put me in a news car, and they said, “Go out.” I think I finally got sent home from work around two thirty, three o’clock Sunday morning, and by that time I had seen.

Large portions of the town.

Folks were worried that two or three thousand people might be dead. You have a large section where it almost looked like the storm had taken a scythe. I have a very good friend who’s home: the largest, highest part of a wall was about four feet. I’m still shocked that he actually survived. Everything was gone, you know, roads, power lines, and poles and trees. That was just debris everywhere. I know a lot of folks would later talk about this—this Tornado Schmitz—that was all over everything, and it was kind of insulation and little pieces of wood, and it’s just, it’s hard to describe what that was like if you haven’t seen it, but it was almost a coating of almost everything.

You know, and it’s, it’s funny.

Ten years later, I could still see Saint John’s Hospital. I mean, the tornado hit it, it hit it, it, it, it’s, it’s like.

It specifically targeted the building.

That was the feeling I always had.

I mean, it broken windows and cars flipped over.

The MedFlight helicopter.

Looked like it had been used as a child’s toy.

And seeing, seeing the building in the shape it was in.

That was, that was tough because it was, it was such an iconic fixture of the community.

I mean, there was, there was.

Nothing that looked like Saint John’s. And that was the first, “Oh, dear, sweet God,” know a moment! This went from being a storm to being one of those epoch moments in life where everything changes, you know.

I remember hearing stories afterwards. I had a couple of friends that were nurses there, and you know, you talk about heroes: those guys were. They were cut up, they were bloodied, and their first thought was get flashlights and find patients, find people who need help. And you know, that’s, I know, I’ve talked about the destruction here, but if you’ll hearmor me for a moment, I said earlier, I can’t imagine living anywhere else. As we were driving across Joplin, the tornado wasn’t even off the ground. You could look to the east and see the tornado, and men and women were out there helping their neighbors. They dug themselves out, and then they went, and they found someone else to help.

That’s what it means to be.

From Southwest Missouri.

I mean, they took one look at this situation and they said, “No, sir, not in our backyard.”

And what a thing to say about your community! The tornado wasn’t even off the ground, and there they were, neighbors digging themselves out and then helping fellow neighbors. And when we come back, we’re going to find out what happened to Joplin when the tornado passed. Here on Our American Stories, and we returned to Our American Stories and the final portion of the story of the May twenty-second, twenty-eleven Joplin tornado and the recovery that happened afterwards.

When we last.

Left off, Joplin had been devastated by an EF five tornado. Here again is Jeremiah Cook and current KSNF reporter Gretchen Bolander with the astonishing story of the recovery of Joplin.

Over the next couple of weeks, there were some long, hard days in there, not just dealing with the news, but my.

House was damaged, and my wife and I.

Were temporarily living with my mom and dad, and she was extremely pregnant. Her place of employment had been blown off the map, so we don’t know if she’s got a job anymore. We haven’t had anybody out to see how badly damaged our house was, and whether or not it was.

Even going to be salvageable. There were just so many unknowns.

But the thing that kept me going every day was going out there and you would see people that had lost everything, and they weren’t worried about themselves. They were worried about the next person over. If I remember correctly, we had the roads cleared in three days, and that was, that was something else.

One of the things we would hear later from FEMA was that the clearing of roads in the Joplin destruction zone was one of the fastest operations they had seen because folks just came. Folks came with their heavy equipment and started moving things. They jumped in. They didn’t wait for someone to say, “Yes, go to this area and do this,” and they just started helping.

We had people who drove their tractors over to move stuff to be of use. They’d show up with their pickup trucks and their shovels.

They would show up with food, they would show up with water, they would show up with anything you needed, even if that was just a shoulder to cry on, for.

A minute, they were there.

I mean, I’ll tell you, I feel like it’s a debta gratitude that can never be repaid.

I do think it definitely speaks to Joplin that people want to help each other. You know, not everybody’s perfect, but when there is a need, people will pitch in. And I have to say for myself, you know, as a reporter, sometimes it’s hard not to become cynical because you do see a lot of bad things that happen to people that