Joplin: A city rising from the rubble [The Kansas City Star, Mo.]
By Eric Adler, Laura Bauer and Mike McGraw, The Kansas City Star, Mo. | |
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services |
Some call it "the dig site," "the war zone," "the scar."
More hopeful residents like Rohr,
It has been seven months since an EF5 tornado gouged a swath of death and destruction through a third of this southwest
"I don't do it anymore," Rohr concedes, "but for a while, for maybe a month after the storm, I had this thing going on. I had this thing where I'd wake and think: 'Did I dream this? Did it really happen?'"
Then, driving to work, his car would crawl into the heart of the zone where the ugly truth has given way to a new reality.
Slowly, painfully -- with its future unsure, with thousands of lives still in upheaval -- a new
Last month,
Insurers, meantime, have already paid out more than
"We would all love to be seven months into this and say everything is rebuilt and we're all done,"
As the year that will define
-- In May,
Today, there is -- depending on one's point of view and mood (and both can change frequently) -- a vast and spirit-sapping emptiness or an encouraging, clean slate rumbling with early construction.
"It's so amazing. ... Everything in the city is cleared in such a manner that you wouldn't expect it to be," said
When
The city has been so busy trying to tend to the living that, a half-year after the storm, the century-old headstones in the cemetery north of where
Yet Farren, for one, is hardly depressed. "I'm hopeful," he said. "I'm real hopeful."
Ten
"It's still pretty barren here. But it's getting better all the time," Farren said.
As for achievements, city leaders have much to point to:
-- When federal officials arrived in
"We didn't have to start from scratch, which is very beneficial," Ostendorf said. "And they are still working the issues for short- and long-term recovery and not calling it quits. We've not seen a chink in their armor as it relates to their ability to respond to the needs of people."
"Look at the result. Look at where we are at," Woolston says. "Everybody's raving about our progress. You don't get there just by accident."
-- Most of the debris that smothered
At peak operation, 806 trucks hauled debris from daylight to dusk to six area landfills.
Even excluding the 224,000 cubic yards of trees and shrubs hauled off in
-- Thousands of trees shattered in the storm have been ground to mulch. Combined with dirt, the organic mix was spread in layers amid landfill debris. By mid-October, grass was already growing on new landfill hillocks.
-- Homes: 45 percent of those destroyed or damaged are now under permit to rebuild or repair; last month, though, only 460 of those were single-family houses. The question of how many of
-- School is in session. Although the tornado destroyed six schools and severely damaged three more, the 2011-2012 school year began on time, 88 days later, with 11th- and 12th-graders starting fresh in a state-of the-art high school fashioned from an existing mall. Ninety-two percent of the district's 7,500 students returned.
"The day the kids went back to school, you could hear the sigh of relief, you could hear it across
-- The hollowed hulk of
A new
Meantime, land has been cleared near the old hospital. Parts of a temporary 120-bed facility have been erected. The land containing the destroyed
--
-- This month, the
-- Retail business is booming. Residents, flush with insurance or
-- Hotels and motels have been booked at 90 to 100 percent capacity since the storm, first catering to emergency workers and displaced families and now to contractors and volunteer builders.
-- Restaurants, to serve the flow of workers, have taken on extra staff.
"It's been outstanding," Waffle House manager
--
-- Carpenters, bricklayers and virtually everyone else in the building trades -- suffering before the tornado from the housing bubble's bursting and one of the worst economic downtowns since the Great Depression -- can count on happier holidays, having more work than they can handle.
"Before (the tornado) they were actually begging for work," said
-- Of 523 businesses damaged or destroyed, more than 400 have rebuilt, been repaired or have committed to do so.
At least one beloved business, Pizza by Stout, a favorite since 1978, is so far not returning. But many other mainstays are, including Dude's
"As soon as I told the first person I wasn't coming back," she said, "I had people coming to my house, calling me on the phone, saying, 'Please come back.'"
Each week, Joplinites are greeted by a spate of "grand reopenings" of big box stores and fast-food restaurants along
"
----
Attitude aside, the tornado also heaved up a wave of problems that many acknowledge will take more than bricks, mortar and a can-do spirit to stem.
Exactly what the rebuilt city -- population some 50,000 before the tornado -- will or should look like continues to be debated.
In November, the city's Citizens Advisory Recovery Team, a panel of some 100 residents, community and city leaders -- offered the
The thinking is that the black cloud that tossed homes, schools, businesses and some 15,000 cars into twisted heaps might also offer a silver-lining opportunity -- urban planning by tornado, just as tiny
The recommendations from the team, known as CART, ranged from bike lanes in all areas of new construction to storm shelters in new schools. It included a mixed-use pilot neighborhood that might serve as a model for future urban core construction: energy-efficient homes with underground utilities on a block where retail mixes with residential.
"I don't think we do justice to the lives that were lost, the people who were injured in the storm, if we don't do our part to build back better than what we had before," said Joplin School Superintendent C.J. Huff, a CART member. "If you don't take this opportunity to build back better and stronger, then we weren't the community I thought we were when I decided to come here."
But there lies a tension:
While planning for the future, city leaders also know they must deal with the here and now, striving to rebuild the city as quickly as possible and return to normal knowing "normal" will have to be redefined.
If displaced residents don't return -- and no one knows how many will -- city and school coffers are certain to suffer.
"I have no doubt we're going to lose families," said Huff, who is nonetheless hopeful. "I know we're going to gain some families in the years to come."
Sixty percent of the district's budget comes from property taxes.
Rohr concedes that he sometimes stays up at night thinking about the figure 1,700. That's the number of single family homes one housing study said need to be rebuilt for the city to regain its footing.
"We can make people clean up their lots, the debris," Rohr said. "We can't make people rebuild."
----
Psychologically, some hold,
"After Christmas, we expect an increase in depression and mental health issues," said
"Add the holidays, the reality of the bills setting in while still driving down a street that looks like
Since the tornado, social workers say they've seen more child sexual abuse, domestic abuse, prostitution and drug abuse (particularly alcohol, prescription drugs and methamphetamine).
In one week, the
"People who were off of meth before are going back to it," said
Women who might have escaped abusive relationships have found themselves, homes and apartments destroyed, returning to the homes of abusers. "Not having any place to go, I went back to a boyfriend,"
Still,
Car thefts doubled to about 40 a month. And looting, for a time, was rampant. The theft of construction material got so bad -- with people ripping new and old copper pipes from homes and copper wires from air-conditioning units -- that cops just stationed themselves outside scrap yards and arrested thieves as they drove up.
"It got to the point where we were getting hundreds of calls a day about looters," Officer
----
Now ... winter.
Construction will slow, and moods sometimes slump. For seven months,
"I guess it would be that the public gets tired of fighting the battle," Woolston said.
Whatever the progress, whatever the pain, Joplinites are confident of one outcome: They will come back.
"The intent is to have the city of
To reach
___
(c)2011 The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Mo.)
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