He said the old adage “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” doesn’t apply here. That’s a normal response, said Joplin psychiatrist Charles Graves. “Because I know I have to talk to myself: 'Breathe, you can’t start crying, you can’t freak out, keep it together and let’s be logical.'” “You can look around the room when you’re gathered there and know who’s been through something like this,” she said. They stick out when there’s a tornado watch at work. Tiffany Stout said it’s easy to tell which people survived the tornado. “I remember hearing this awful screaming. “You kind of have an out of body experience,” she says. Her mother, Tiffany Stout, says she remembers the feeling of the roof coming off and their house lifting off the ground. KCUR Allie Stout, left, was three years old at the time of the tornado she keeps a tornado bag with important possessions close at hand. And inside I have my blanket that I liked to have when I was a kid. “And, I have it right over here, it’s just this little backpack. “My tornado bag is what I like to call it,” she said. And she keeps her most important possessions close at hand. But Allie Stout said she still gets anxious when it’s stormy. “We spin around in circles, and we get in a house, and we lie down, and it's blasting off, and we have to lie on the ground,” Allie Stout said at the time.įast forward ten and half years, and the tiny girl caught in an imaginary whirlwind is now a confident, athletic 14-year-old. And, like many children here in the weeks that followed, she relived the storm over and over again.

Worse yet, she said, her children lost their innocence. Like more than 9,000 of her fellow citizens, Stout lost most of her belongings. Her husband’s shoulder was dislocated, her dog was missing.

Broken gas lines were hissing, downed power lines were sparking. When she crawled from the wreckage covered in mud, splinters and insulation, her neighborhood as she knew it had vanished. “You know you kind of have an out of body experience. And Shane had his arms over us trying to hold us down,” she recalled. And I could feel us coming off the ground. “It was almost instantly the roof came off our house. She was wedged in a hallway with her husband Shane and their two small children. Tiffany Stout, a human resources director here, narrowly survived. “If you're from here and you, and you look at over this landscape, I still see the scars,” Micklethwaite said. But, Micklethwaite said, even all these years later the pain remains fresh. New buildings and small trees are growing between stretches of open space. Ten years ago, heaps of splintered rubble stretched for miles. The production, which built seven homes a few blocks from the park, also took on the task of building a play area and basketball court at Cunningham Park, introducing these features to the public in October 2011.Micklethwaite was president of Joplin’s school board when an EF5 tornado struck that city of 50,000 people. Thanks to Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, that all changed. My kids and I weren’t the only ones who missed playing at Cunningham Park in the months after the tornado lots of people were hard-pressed to find a space in Joplin where their kids could run and play with no worries. The result was a touching tribute, not only to the past, but to the ever-present power of the human spirit. All of those beautiful shade trees were transformed into matchsticks, tossed with mangled playground equipment, then lumped into piles of debris.īut it didn’t take long for the people of our city, working alongside thousands of volunteers from all over the country and all over the world, to clean up the twisted bits of our former buildings and parks, and to create fresh spaces where we could form new memories. Unfortunately, what my girls and I knew as Helicopter Park was destroyed by the EF5 tornado that roared through Joplin on May 22, 2011. So many leaves on the ground from so many trees!

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