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May 4, 2008

Anonymous The Joplin Globe Sun May 04, 2008, 11:13 AM CDT

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.

The tornadoes destroyed 784 houses in Missouri and 169 in Kansas. They damaged 1,819 houses in Missouri and 330 in Kansas. The figures do not include outbuildings and barns. The tornadoes destroyed 53 businesses in Missouri and 21 in Kansas, and they damaged 103 businesses in Missouri and 19 in Kansas.

The Missouri Department of Insurance estimated that the May 4, 2003, storms in Missouri caused insured losses in excess of $400 million. The National Weather Service station in Springfield said the losses in Southwest Missouri totaled $197 million. The losses in Southeast Kansas totaled $81 million.

Swiss Re, an international insurance agency, said the storms that swept across Missouri and other parts of the Midwest in early May of 2003 caused $3.2 billion in insured losses, making the tornado outbreak the single most costly natural catastrophe in North America in that year.

Rising up

The twisters ripped apart families, homes and entire communities. But they did not overwhelm the will of the people whose lives were upended. The storms did not destroy their dreams. They only tested their resilience, their resolve.

“If we didn’t have the ice storm, I don’t think you could tell that a tornado hit,” Steve Lawver, director of economic development in Carl Junction, said recently. “Everything has been fixed or repaired.”

A new Community Center and Heritage Museum anchors Franklin, Kan. New homes have gone up there, and others have been repaired. A new community park was constructed.

“The people of Franklin are the reason the town is doing so well,” said Craig Stokes, chairman of the Franklin Community Council. “They didn’t sit around waiting for someone to help them. They just went to work.”

Julie Johnson, the city clerk in Pierce City, took shelter in the National Guard Armory, a fortress-like structure that served as the town’s storm shelter. Today, Pierce City has three storm shelters, each capable of holding several hundred people.

“I just got in the door of the armory, and here it comes right down the middle of Commercial Street. We hid in the bathrooms,” she said. “When we came out of the armory, we couldn’t believe what had happened. It didn’t seem real. Our whole way of life as a town had been changed in a matter of seconds.”

Johnson would become the face of Pierce City. She appeared on the Weather Channel’s “Storm Stories” program and on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” The day after the storm, she told former Mayor Mark Peters that she guessed she would have to find a new job. His response: not so fast.

“I had no clue about what was to start,” she said. “Here I am five years later, and I’m still doing paperwork and dealing with red tape. I’ve got the books to prove it. We’re still not done.

“What I have learned from this is that good things come out of tragedy. It does not seem like it at the time, but we have come back bigger and better. We have a better drugstore and a better grocery store. We have a Dollar General store now and things we never had before. It just takes time.”

The town has converted the old armory into the new home for the Clark Center, a mental-health agency that will bring 50 new jobs to Pierce City by the end of the year.

But there was one thing that more than anything else symbolized Pierce City’s return.

“It was our bandstand. It was symbolic of our past and the future,” Johnson said. “It was back up within a year. For us, it’s a forever thing. When it came back, it meant Pierce City was coming back — and we have.”

$3.8 billion

According to records of the National Climatic Data Center that go back to 1950, 412 tornadoes were reported nationwide in a 10-day period from May 1 to May 10, 2003. That is the most ever for that period. The tornadoes that moved through the Midwest and the Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee river valleys caused $3.8 billion in damage (adjusted for 2007 dollars) and claimed 51 lives. It was the most expensive tornado outbreak since at least 1980, according to the center.