Family thankful for opportunity to start over

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May 15, 2008

Anonymous The Joplin Globe Thu May 15, 2008, 10:25 PM CDT

By Melissa Dunson

mdunson@joplinglobe.com

In a moment, Bill Lant’s appetite was gone.

Lant had just seen what was left of his feed store and bridal shop at Iris Road and Highway 43 on the television news as officials announced it would become the emergency command center and temporary morgue for the tornado-recovery effort.

“Needless to say, I wasn’t able to finish my sandwich,” Lant said.

That was Saturday night. The television crews now are gone, as well as the high-ranking government officials and most of the sightseers. But Lant, his wife, Jane, and his neighbors are still there, picking up the pieces and making plans to rebuild.

The Lants are not alone. Although still awaiting a federal disaster declaration for Newton County late Thursday afternoon, county officials said preliminary estimates indicate that the total damage in the private sector could be at least $30 million, while the cost to the public sector could be about $4 million.

Newton County Presiding Commissioner Jerry Carter said county officials reached those estimates based on damage surveys that have been conducted by members of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the State Emergency Management Agency.

“We think that is a fairly conservative figure,” Carter said of the $30 million estimate.

Those assessments indicate 141 homes were destroyed by Saturday’s tornado, and 51 were damaged to the point that they are uninhabitable, Carter said. An additional 185 homes sustained relatively minor damage, while 80 were “affected” by the storm in some way, he said.

Nine businesses were either destroyed or damaged to a major degree, while another nine reported minor damage and three were affected in some way by the storm.

The figure on damage to private homes and businesses does not include the damage estimates for items including cars, sheds, barns, fences, utilities and livestock, Carter said.

Alive and well

Lant’s Country Feed Store and Lant’s Bridal Garden sat in that location for 10 years until Saturday. There’s no use looking to the past, Bill Lant said. The place 1.5 miles down the road where the businesses previously were located also was destroyed.

But Lant had a smile on his face Thursday as he moved lumber, wedding dresses and dog food into large burn piles.

“I just don’t really see much reason to be unhappy about it at this point,” he said. “The Lord saw fit to let us all live through this. There’s nothing here you can’t replace. It’s the people that matter. All the rest of it is just junk.”

No one was injured in the Lants’ businesses. They both closed at 5 p.m. Saturday, a mere 30 minutes before the storm flattened the structure. Lant realizes how fortunate his family and employees are. He had always told his employees that in the event of a storm, they should go to the feed store’s large, walk-in refrigerator. All that was left of that metal box Saturday night was a mangled door lying on a pile of boards.

“I’ve seen tornado damage before, but nothing like this,” he said.

The Lants’ home three miles from the stores sustained only minor hail damage.

But Lant has to admit that things won’t be the same after the twister. The Ozarks oddity that was the all-in-one bridal shop and country feed store will not return. He said he plans to rebuild the feed store at that location and hopes to open by Sept. 1. But Jane Lant will not reopen her bridal store. That part is over, he said.

“It was a big joke for a while,” Bill Lant said. “It was like you know you’re in the Ozarks when you can get a bridal gown and hog feed without ever leaving the building.”

Jane Lant is considering continuing the dried-flower part of her business with a smaller shop that she would open later. But right now, Lant said, his wife is more excited about spending some more time with her six grandchildren.

Destruction

Bill Lant said some of the bridal shop’s 800 in-stock wedding and prom gowns have been found as far as 100 miles away from the shop. A piece of the feed store’s sign was found in a yard in Sarcoxie. Three truck trailers filled with supplies for the feed store were thrown from the parking lot to an adjacent field. Another trailer full of antique car parts that Lant uses to restore old Fords in his spare time also was destroyed.

According to a woman who weathered the storm by cowering in her car in front of the Lants’ building, the businesses were flattened in less than 10 seconds.

“I always thought a tornado would drag on for a while, but she said she saw it coming, ducked in time for her windows to blow out, then looked up to see it was gone,” Bill Lant said. “In five to seven seconds, it was all over.”

Lant said almost all of the bridal shop’s merchandise and much of the feed store’s was ruined. He did recover 10 to 15 tons of feed from the wreckage.

Jane Lant is still looking for her order book with all her information on brides-to-be and their dress orders, and she is encouraging women who ordered dresses to contact her or stop by what’s left of the business to trade contact information.

Outpouring of help

One of Lants’ sons, Craig, flew in from Alaska a week ago. He was supposed to be on vacation. As he hauled away the wooden frame of his parents’ businesses, he laughed about how his vacation was turning out.

“This is kind of the opposite of what I normally do,” said Craig Lant, who is employed as a construction worker in Alaska.

But it wasn’t just the Lant family rolling up sleeves. Help came from everywhere. On Thursday, Rick Alford was chucking rotting orange juice and burlap sacks of potatoes into garbage piles at the feed store’s location. Alford is one of the Lants’ neighbors and an electrical engineer who could have been using his mind to make good money. Instead, he was using his muscle to touch his neighbors’ hearts.

“The outpouring of help is incredible,” Bill Lant said. “I can’t say enough about it. It’s mind-boggling. I shudder to think of the dollars an hour that (Rick) would get at work, and yet here he is.”

Even the response by other local businesses caught him off guard. As a small rural business owner, Lant said he was the first one to bad-mouth corporate titans, but he said local Wal-Mart trucks were some of the first on the scene, delivering thousands of dollars worth of food, drinks and tarps to the tornado-torn area.

“I’m not going to do that anymore,” Lant said. “Those are some pretty special guys.”

Public sector

Damage to the public sector from Saturday’s tornado has been estimated at $4 million in Newton County. It largely consists of the cost of cleaning debris from roads and other public infrastructure, said Presiding Commissioner Jerry Carter.