Papers, pictures, checks strewn across wide area by May 10 tornado

May 19, 2008 11:32 pm

— By Seth Putnam
news@joplinglobe.com
As if victims of the May 10 tornado don’t have enough to worry about, their personal belongings have begun turning up all over the region.
A violent EF4 tornado hit Picher, Okla., that day and traveled 71 miles on the ground. Winds reached 170 mph and, according to the National Weather Service in Springfield, a car in Newton County was carried one-half mile.
Lighter objects were carried even farther.
George Richards, a Wentworth resident, was standing on his daughter’s porch watching the storm roll through.
“Two dead birds fell out of the sky,” he said. “Then a huge piece of corrugated metal came down on the highway.”
When he returned home, he found wreckage littered across his property.
“I spent all day covering about 40 acres, picking up trash and piling it in my pickup,” he said. “I’ve got quite a bit of corrugated metal roofing, vinyl siding and three different colors of shingles. There’s lots of insulation.”
Richards was amazed by what else he found.
“I also found a section of a sign from Lant’s Feed Store,” he said.
Before being demolished, the feed store was 30 miles away, near Seneca.
“I couldn’t believe that stuff was here,” Richards said. “That’s quite a long way.”
Angela Short, of Quapaw, Okla., who was in Springfield that day, saw other storm debris.
“We went outside to see what the weather condition was,” Short said. “It was between a sprinkle and a soft rain. (My sister) said, ‘Look up in the sky; there’s debris falling.’”
They found tarpaper, half of a recipe card, part of a tax form and, in the middle of the road, a perfect check.
“It was from 1993, made out to a school for $16.50,” Short said. “There was nothing wrong with it. The ink wasn’t smeared or anything.”
Short said she recognized the need for careful handling of the check because one of her co-workers recently was a victim of identity theft.
She also said the image of objects falling out of the sky was bizarre.
“You’d look up into the gray, misty, low-lying clouds, and things would just start falling every now and then,” she said. “You’re thinking, ‘How close is that thing if there’s stuff falling out of the air?’”
A Springfield couple doing yard work found two photographs belonging to Picher residents Jack and Rayma Redden, whose home was destroyed May 10.
Robyn and Alan Bates found the photos stuck together back-to-back, wrapped in shredded photo-album plastic and spattered with bits of mud and leaves. One shows the Reddens wearing matching sweaters on Christmas Day 1971, and the other shows a young girl holding a doll on Easter 1972.
Web site link
KY3 News out of Springfield has a section on its Web site called YouNews. It’s dedicated to viewers’ photographs and video clips taken from mobile phones or digital cameras. In the days after the tornado, contributors began to post pictures of debris found in the Springfield area.
A check from the First Baptist Church in Picher was found in Phillipsburg (southwest of Lebanon), 119 miles away. A business card for a Picher asphalt paving and repair business was found in Springfield. A photograph showed up in a back yard north of Marshfield.
“We don’t know how far it traveled,” wrote YouNews user Liza Jane. “It looks like a family vacation photo. We would like for the family to have it.”
The cover page of a Seneca family’s policy with Cameron Mutual Insurance Co. was found in Ozark. One of Cameron Mutual’s specialties is tornado insurance.
Other postings on the Web site detailed debris found in Billings and Republic.
Gene Hartley, online news producer for KY3, said YouNews has become a popular part of the Web site.
“People started contacting us Saturday evening (May 10) almost as soon as the tornadoes touched the ground,” Hartley said. “A lot of the things are mementos that we hope get back to people, but we’ll leave it to individuals to sort that out amongst themselves.
“I took off one photo of a check where you could see the Social Security and account numbers. It’s to protect the individuals.”
That wasn’t the only check that was found.
“We just got a message from someone who lives 12 miles east of here,” Hartley said. “They found a canceled check from a family in Granby.”
The finder, Jeff Malone, was mowing his yard when he spotted the check in the grass.
“I found it out front, just mowing,” he said. “It’s a personal check from a family in Granby, written to a lumberyard there in 1986. It must have been in their records.”
The check was in near perfect condition.
Malone ran inside his house and pulled up Google to see how far Granby is from his house: 56 miles. When he realized where the check had come from, he was shocked.
“It was disturbing,” he said. “I just hope they are OK. It was very sobering.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.


‘Long-term supercell’

Kelsey Angle, a meteorologist at the Springfield branch of the National Weather Service, said the May 10 tornado was exceptional because of its time on the ground.
“Most tornadoes are pretty short-lived, only lasting a few minutes,” he said. “What’s unique about this storm is that it was a long-term supercell that produced a continuous path of damage over many miles. Naturally, you’re going to have some debris that gets suspended in the thunderstorm as it continues to propagate.”

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