Tornado outbreak survivors say they’re stronger for the rebuilding w/ reporter's notebook and photo gallery

By Wally Kennedy

wkennedy@joplinglobe.com

Five years ago today, Nancy Sneed looked out her basement window and saw a monster. It was bearing down on her rural Lawrence County home, ripping up everything in its path.

She and her husband, Ellis, thought they were going to die. She ran to the other side of the basement to get under a stairwell. He stayed where he was. When the tornado passed over their home, it took everything but the fireplace. Then, the floor above them collapsed. They were separated from each other in the basement.

Nancy Sneed remembers that moment when she summoned the courage to call out her husband’s name.

“I was so scared,” she said. “I was too scared to call out his name. I was afraid he would not answer. I called for him, and he answered, ‘Yes.’”

She said that when they climbed out of their basement, “I told him, all that we had worked for — 40 years of work — is gone. And then I stopped, and I thought, ‘But, we’re alive.’”

Today, Ellis Sneed remembers that day as if it were yesterday.

“I figured she was crushed to death. She figured I was crushed to death. It was the worst moment of our lives,” he said. “We lost everything. Our home and our autos were destroyed. But we were fortunate. A half-mile on either side of us, people were killed. Because we lived, we don’t feel like victims. We still have each other. Everything else can be replaced.”

Death’s toll

The big, black cloud that swirled from one side of Lawrence County to the other, with winds in excess of 200 mph, would kill seven people, destroy Pierce City’s brick and limestone downtown that had stood since the Civil War, and lay waste to dozens of homes. It would stay on the ground for 43 miles.

But it was not the only storm that would leave a path of destruction that day. Two other massive thunderstorms were generating tornadoes in Cherokee County and Crawford County in Kansas. Weather experts said that what unfolded that day was simply “unprecedented.”

The tornado that stormed across Cherokee County and 10 miles into Jasper County would stay on the ground for 65 minutes, killing five people and damaging all 40 homes in the community of Smithfield and nearly one-third of all the buildings in Carl Junction.

The tornado that struck Crawford County — the most powerful of the three, with wind speeds exceeding 260 mph — pulled grass from the ground. It all but leveled most of the community of Franklin, Kan., before tracking across two counties and descending on Stockton, destroying hundreds of homes, churches and businesses. It would stay on the ground for 75 miles and nearly two hours. That tornado killed three killed people in Crawford County, one in Barton County and three in Cedar County.

By the end of the day, the most catastrophic weather event in the history of Southwest Missouri and Southeast Kansas had exacted a horrible toll. The tornadoes killed six people in Kansas and 18 in Missouri. The fatalities include the 19 in the immediate area. A total of 187 people were injured.