May 13, 2008 12:45 am
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By Wally Kennedy
wkennedy@joplinglobe.com
PICHER, Okla. — When a friend came by Saturday to check on Nancy Cruzan, she had only one thing on her mind: her younger sister, Sally Lane.
“What I told her is that we’ve got to go check on my sister,” Cruzan said. “She said to me: ‘Nancy, your sister doesn’t have a home anymore. There’s nothing left.’”
Cruzan, 74, said her friend did not want her to go to her sister’s house because they could not account for her sister’s whereabouts. She was among the missing.
“I said, ‘I have got to go down there,’” Cruzan said. “When we pulled up, I could not believe what I saw. My house had not been touched by the tornado. Sally’s house was gone.
“They told me to stay in the car until they could find her. They checked all over and could not find her.”
With tears in her eyes, she said: “I looked over, and one of the people who was searching for her turned to me and gave me two thumbs up. She was alive.”
Lane, 71, took shelter in her bathroom tub from the massive tornado that descended from a thunderstorm late Saturday afternoon near Chetopa, Kan., and then ripped through Picher and into neighboring counties in Missouri, killing at least 22 people and injuring hundreds.
In Picher, it killed at least six people and injured more than 150.
On Monday, authorities said a seventh person had died in Picher, but not directly from storm-related injuries. That person, whose identity was not released, died of carbon-monoxide poisoning when fumes from a generator that was turned on after the storm left power outages in the area filled the home with fumes. Two other people in the house were hospitalized for carbon-monoxide poisoning.
“It was scary,” Lane said. “I heard the roaring sound, and then I thought, ‘Here it comes.’ Then the glass started breaking. I looked up and could see the sky. That’s when I knew I had no roof.
“The tub pulled away from the wall, and stuff started falling down on me. It was too heavy for me to move. I could not budge it. And then it stopped.”
Lane stuck her hand out from the rubble and called out for help.
“And then someone said, ‘We’ll get you out,” she said.
Reliving her ordeal on Monday, Lane said, “I would have been dead in any other place in the house.”
Said Cruzan: “The hand of God was on us.”
Down the street
Larry Lyerla and his wife, Vicki, were watching a movie on cable television in their home about two blocks south of Lane’s home.
“I got a call from my son, who said, ‘Dad, you need to be watching regular TV because there’s a storm coming,’” Lyerla said. “I went to the front door and saw people flying down the street in their cars. They must have been going 80 mph.
“I opened the front door, and there it was. It was coming over that chat pile. That’s when the sirens went off. The tornado had already hit the west side of Picher.
“I said: ‘Babe, we’re in trouble. Get what you got and let’s go.’”
For a moment, Lyerla and his wife thought about seeking shelter in their bathroom. Instead, they jumped into their car and headed east and then north as fast as their car would take them. Some of their neighbors were doing the same thing. That’s when their windshield was hit by a hailstone as large as a softball.
“When we turned to go north, I felt like the car was coming up in the back end,” he said. “If I would have slowed up on the speed, I think we would have been gone. That was the scary part.”
When the Lyerlas returned to their address, their home was gone.
“That’s where the bathroom was,” he said, pointing to part of the foundation. “There were three houses over there and two houses next us. They’re gone.
“We got nothing. We have no insurance. We just dropped it because of the buyout,” a reference to the federal buyout of properties in the lead-contaminated town.
Lyerla, 67, and members of his family on Monday picked through the rubble of what was their home, salvaging whatever they could. He said he and his wife will find a place to rent until they can get back on their feet.
“We got to start over and rebuild,” Lyerla said. “That’s all you can do. We’re just thankful we got our lives.”
Closet angels
Jana Mattison was visiting her father and mother, Johnny and Patty LaFalier, on Saturday when she got a telephone call from her husband that bad weather was coming. She then got another telephone call that Picher could be in trouble.
“I ran to the front porch, and there it was,” she said. “It was huge. This thing was just looming and rotating. I couldn’t tell which way it was going.
“It came over that chat pile, and I can tell you right now that chat pile is shorter than what it was. It was a huge tornado, not some little funnel.”
As the storm sirens wailed, Mattison grabbed her mother and put her in a closet with her brother. She then climbed into another closet with her father.
“We barely got inside the closets,” she said. “I put a pillow over my head and hunkered down. You could hear the roar outside and the breaking glass, and you could feel the change in air pressure in your ears.”
When they emerged from the closets and looked outside, virtually all of the houses south of the LaFalier house had been destroyed.
“People came out of their houses and started checking on their neighbors,” Mattison said. “The emergency responders were here really quick.
“I did not think we were going to make it. There were angels in those closets.”
The storm
A National Weather Service storm survey team, dispatched to Picher from Tulsa on Sunday, determined that the twister had an EF4 rating, the second-highest rating. The tornado was one mile wide at its widest point and achieved wind speeds of 165 to 175 mph.
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Photos
The Associated Press
Tiffany Tush carries a dresser drawer Sunday from the home of her sister, Holly Tush, in Picher. Many of the homes in the south part of the former mining town were destroyed.