May 14, 2008 11:17 pm
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By Greg Grisolano
ggrisolano@joplinglobe.com
PICHER, Okla. — Elizabeth Wood isn’t sure where she’s going to go after her home in the Mineral Heights neighborhood was leveled by Saturday’s deadly tornado.
“Where do you go from here?” Wood asked after she left the lot at 308 E. Eighth St. where he home once stood. “It’s just all gone, all gone.”
An antique bathtub and a couch are all that she recognized amid the rubble.
“I could’ve dealt with it burning. I could have dealt with it being tore down,” she said amid tears. “But to see this.
“My husband was raised on that lot where that foundation is sitting,” she said, pointing to another ruined home nearby. “His father built that place. My grandfather built this one. It’s where me and my husband started going together.”
Six people died in Picher when a tornado ripped through Northeast Oklahoma and Southwest Missouri on Saturday. An additional 16 people died of storm-related injuries in Jasper, Newton and Barry counties in Missouri. A seventh Picher resident died of carbon-monoxide poisoning in a generator accident in the wake of the storm.
Preliminary reports estimate the damage caused by the EF4 tornado that tore through Picher at more than $1.5 million in Ottawa County alone, according to Frank Geasland, Ottawa County’s emergency management coordinator. Countywide, more than 140 homes, including 114 in Picher, were destroyed by the tornado, he said.
On Wednesday, President Bush issued a disaster declaration, meaning that Ottawa County residents whose homes were destroyed or damaged in the storm will be eligible to receive individual assistance, including grants for temporary housing and low-cost loans to cover uninsured property losses.
The community is in the midst of a federal buyout because of the legacy left by lead and zinc mining.
At a news conference Tuesday in Picher, Gov. Brad Henry said federal aid would be used to relocate — not rebuild — homes affected by the disaster.
Wood said her family received about two-thirds of the funds from its buyout offer in March and was living in a home in Miami when the storm hit.
She said she plans to pursue the remaining funds from the buyout and to purchase the home in Miami where she is living.
“The place we’re in right now, we’re going to go ahead with the contract,” she said. “It’ll take us 30 years to pay it off, but at least we got a roof over our head and a place for our children to go.”
On the move
Members of another family doing some storm salvage Wednesday said they plan to move to Joplin, Mo.
Insurance will pay for Frank Frazier’s family to stay in an apartment in Joplin starting Friday. Frazier and his family have been staying with relatives who live in Loma Linda, south of Joplin, since their house at 708 S. Emily St. was destroyed.
“We talked to the insurance today, and they said they’d pay the rent for a reasonable amount of time it took to get another permanent address,” Frazier said.
He said his home was scheduled to be appraised for the buyout.
“I’ve heard they’re going to offer you the option,” he said. “If it’s more than what the insurance would pay, we have the option of taking it.”
Frazier said he hopes his family will be moved into a new permanent residence by December.
“We thought if this buyout happened, we’d probably move up around Joplin,” he said. “This just speeded everything up by a couple years.”
Housing strain
Larry Roberts, operations manager for the buyout trust, said the trust owned at least 26 unoccupied houses in the Mineral Heights neighborhood that were damaged or destroyed by the tornado.
He said the trust has closed on 160 properties in Picher, putting an additional strain on the housing market in Ottawa County.
“We definitely have a housing shortage in Ottawa County,” he said. “The flood from this summer (last July) created more of a problem in our area.”
Roberts said he estimates that the buyout will be delayed by about two months for residents whose homes were not affected by the storm.
“We are going to expedite the tornado victims,” he said. “The other people are just going to have to wait a little longer.”
The goal is to have buyout offers for storm victims completed within six weeks.
“The homeowners that were approved last night (Tuesday) that were victims to the storm should be getting an offer over the weekend or early next week,” he said.
Miami plan
Larry Eller, community development and grant coordinator for Miami, said his city has been severely affected as well by the tornado, in that eight city employees who lived in Picher lost their homes and all their possessions.
Eller said he is working on a proposal that he plans to bring before the Miami City Council on Monday.
Under normal circumstances, Eller said, a community such as Picher would be eligible for numerous grants to help rebuild. But, because of the environmental and undermining hazards in the community that have necessitated the buyout, those funds would not be available. Eller’s proposal is to work with city officials in Picher to have families move to Miami, and to have the city apply for those rebuilding grants on behalf of Picher.
“We would like to have the people from Picher come here and live, put down roots and raise families,” he said.
Eller said the city has at least 22 families living in disaster trailers, provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who are awaiting homes after record flooding submerged much of Miami last summer. Those families are to be given first priority once the city completes the homes that are being constructed in a new subdivision, but Eller said he believes displaced Picher residents also could be eligible to move into some of those units.
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