Crime & Safety

Mehlville District Firefighters Search Through "Utter Destruction" in Joplin

Five firefighters helped for two days in Joplin.

Five firefighters from the were called to duty in Joplin, MO after a devastating tornado ripped through the town.

They returned early Thursday morning and sat down with Patch on Friday to talk about their work, the destruction and how the town is coping.

After receiving deployment orders Monday evening, a caravan of 50 vehicles with firefighters from all over St. Louis County arrived in Joplin early Tuesday morning and after a quick nap, started work.

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“We’re driving down the highway, and we see a few trees down and see a few more. And then as we get closer, we can see buildings and houses down, and it still doesn’t look really bad. You can tell a tornado hit, but you still can’t see it,” said Capt. Ty Cardona. “Then the next morning, we all took off as a large convoy down 20th Avenue, and that’s when we all realized what we were in for, what we were about to do. The place was just leveled. Trees that were 60 feet tall were just stumps with limbs sticking out, no leaves of course. The bark had been ripped off the trees, I had never seen that before.”

The firefighters stayed in the dorms at Missouri Southern University, just a few miles from Joplin. Their main mission was to perform searches of large apartment complexes, houses and schools. All of the Mehlville firefighters are structural collapse technicians, and they split up the buildings, working from the street inward.

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“You can see it on TV, and nothing really makes you understand the devastation until you actually are there, until you can smell it and see it,” said Asst. Chief Brian Hendricks. “When you’re actually standing there looking at the just utter destruction of it, that tornado went through and ate that town. There is just nothing left.”

The first day, they searched through a large apartment building that was reduced to 15-20 feet of rubble, finding no survivors. The unit used search cams on poles with lights that could look down in gaps where walls had fallen down, creating holes.

The squads also targeted areas that had been combed by the K-9 teams, double-checking hits that the dogs had found.

“When you get inside the building, you look anywhere people might have gone,” Hendricks said. “You dig to get to the bed; you look in the closets, bathtubs, in the kitchen under tables, anywhere you think someone might have run or sought shelter. You have no idea where people are going to be. You’re not looking for the people that are living there, but people were blown hundreds of feet from their houses.”

Using whatever equipment they had, from jackhammers to heavy movers and pry bars, they searched for two days. Aside from looking for people, the firefighters tried to salvage memorabilia.

“You’d find yourself digging through peoples’ lives,” Hendricks said. “You’d find photo albums and pictures, and these people are trying to salvage that. You’d go out and hand this stuff to them, and they were just unbelievably appreciative.“

Hendricks said one of the firefighters came across a woman and her fiancé, who told them how she had lost her wedding dress. The firefighter recalled seeing it, and returned it to her unharmed.

“She was just elated because she got that back, that’s something that meant a lot to her,” Hendricks said.

Along with searching for survivors, Hendricks said the firefighters were there to provide closure to the families.

“You go there to try to help obviously search for survivors, but also to bring closure to those families, especially to the ones that have lost love ones,” he said. “Everything that they had that morning, in 15 minutes was gone. I don’t know how you rebound from that. Our biggest thing was to help the families bring closure to this horrible situation.”

Joplin rests in an area of the country known as Tornado Alley. However, Hendricks was surprised to see a lack of basements in the city.

“I didn’t go into one basement. I was at apartments, I was at houses, but I didn’t see a lot of basements,” he said. “(The people) went in the bathrooms, bathtubs, under stairwells and the most interior room of the house with no windows.”

One man sought shelter in the bathtub of his apartment with his nephew. They were making food for the nephew’s high school graduation party when the winds started blowing and transformers popped, Cardona said. The man covered himself and his nephew in a blanket and could feel himself getting lifted out of the bathtub as the roof and walls were torn from the building.

Both of them survived the tornado, with the uncle only suffering from a piece of wood getting shoved through his leg, which was hanging out of the tub.

“We were shocked someone survived out of there,” Cardona said.

With winds hitting 200 miles an hour, the power of Mother Nature was the biggest shock to some of the firefighters.

“I saw a piece of plywood, that was probably 12 inches by 12 inches long and it was shoved in between where the truck and the fender meet in the back of a car,” Cardona said. “The cars just looked like they had been put in the back of a concrete mixer and had been tumbled around.”

Hendricks described scenes of mattresses in trees and kitchen sinks in the back seats of cars.

“It’s just unbelievable power,” he said. “You have 8,000 buildings down, there’s just thousands of homes that are just gone.”

Rescue techniques were fresh in the minds of the firefighters. In a twist of fate, just one week before the tornado, the county had strike team training.

“What was weird is that we did a strike team training session the previous Thursday through Saturday out in Chesterfield,” Cardona said. “We just trained together for three days straight, so that helped. We all had gotten to know each other again and were ready to go.”

For both Hendricks and Cardona, this was the worst destruction they had ever seen while serving.

“You never get used to it, you focus in on your task, on doing what you’re there to do, but every once and a while when you step out into the street, you can’t help but just look around and just go ‘oh my gosh,’ and you focus back on what you’re doing,” Hendricks said.


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