JOPLIN, Mo. - This city is a tornado textbook.
You don't register with anyone to come see what nature's whirlwinds can do. So there's no count of the motorists who have brought their news-excited curiosity here since the afternoon of May 22.
The more-than-200-miles-per-hour wind that blew through was the most violent tornado to hit the United States since 1947. A mile wide, it slammed through this city of 50,000, killing 160 people, including a half-dozen poor souls on ventilators in the top floor of a windows-blown-out hospital.
Seven thousand homes were laid waste, 500 businesses ravaged. Insurance claims had topped 17,000 by July, and dollar damages might yet hit the $3 billion of top estimates.
Driving through southwest Misssouri, you're struck by how chancy these devastations are.
In the heart of Joplin's downtown, no damage. A half-mile away, total damage: blocks and blocks of weedy wasteland. Strewn across what looks like acres of untended lawn are leveled buildings -- but leveled is too orderly a word. Think rather of piles of construction waste, trees torn off by the roots or, if left standing, gaunt, leafless, battlefield skeletons.
Yet here is an undamaged Walgreens. Miraculously missed, you think. But no, this is a corporate rebuild, in a record 90 days (it usually takes six months). Wal-Mart and Home Depot also reopened fast, the latter in a temporary 60,000 square foot shell, with tools, lumber and fixtures to sell. A high-rise, windowless ruin behind a chain link keep-out fence is St. Johns Regional Hospital; a rebirth is planned at another site. A mile away Freedman Women's Hospital wasn't touched.
Desk clerk Katie Wieberg told a motel guest she grabbed her daughter, 18 months, and ran to the basement of her house when city's storm sirens sounded. Every window in her house shattered overhead, and three-quarters of the roof shingles blew off. Her husband, Derek, got the car in a garage seconds before trees collapsed on the driveway. She knows a retired schoolteacher, in her 80s, who was lifted up and hurled a full city block -- and lived.
Dollar damage to the Wieberg house⢠"I don't really know," Katie Wieberg said. "The homeowner's insurance covered it."
Tall, ruddy Mike Shoemaker, 43, a heavy equipment operator originally from Harrisburg, climbed down from a bulldozer moving wreckage. After survivors have picked through for valuables, bricks and copper pipe are salvageable; asbestos waste in heavy plastic bags fills dumpsters.
A friend of Wieberg's tried to drive home, took desperate shelter beneath a highway underpass. Her car windows blew out, everything around her was inky dark and filled with flying stuff, but she came out without a scratch. Seventeen survivors got hauled out of smashed houses the day after.
So many motorists have stopped by looking for the damage on the news, including thousands of aid volunteers, that one motel printed directions and a street map to the hardest-hit stretches.
The scenes in hot sunlight are undoubtedly tragic and awesome. They'd be more sharply depressing, though, had they come about by human violence, ill will or carelessness. Not guilty for once. This was nature, a sobering thought.
