EDITORIAL: A day to remember, to recall lessons
May 21—The final Joplin Memorial Run wrapped up Saturday. Banners honoring the victims have been given to loved ones.
The Whataburger that recently opened on Range Line Road is at the site of the former Taco Hut restaurant. That lot is the last vacant property to be redeveloped in the tornado zone along Range Line Road.
Boomtown, a wooden playset in Cunningham Park donated by the "Extreme Home Makeover" crew, has come and gone, deteriorated due to weathering and use.
Other evidence of the May 22, 2011, tornado is fading too.
You don't hear people talking about it as much any more either.
Yet the people killed by that storm and the lessons learned must remain ever present.
We hope you'll allow us a moment to offer some perspective on what we saw 13 years ago, and in the days, months and years that followed.
Over the years, we've written about the lessons learned, and today is a good day to recall some of those lessons, as well as to remember the 161 people who died.
What we saw 13 years ago was that the tornado brought out the best in our community — our compassion, our resilience, our determination. We urge this community to remember the work, the sweat and the sacrifice we saw in our neighbors, but also in those from around the world.
How compassionate? How resilient? How determined? Within 48 hours, Freeman treated 1,000 patients, many of them severely injured. Storm victims were showing up within minutes, one man with his intestines in his hands. One doctor described the injured humanity piling up in Freeman's halls and lobby as a "tsunami."
Within a week, St. John's was up and running in a temporary hospital in a parking lot in the shadow of the wrecked hospital. This tent hospital had an emergency department, surgical suites, MRI and CT scan capabilities, a pharmacy and 60 inpatient beds. And two months later, they moved into a second temporary hospital — three times larger than the first.
Home Depot quickly reopened; Walgreens was among the first to completely rebuild both stores that were hit.
Schools opened that fall, as promised.
What we saw 13 years ago was that it took all of us working together to get our city back on its feet.
It, of course, took a public sector, with its vast financial and organizational resources — the Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and others. Governments provided everything from temporary housing to federal grants to rebuild.
But it also took boundless resources of the private sector — more than a hundred thousand volunteers from all over the world — to be the boots on the ground, cleaning up the rubble, patching up the wounded, revving up the chainsaws and framing the homes.
The lesson of the Joplin tornado is that neither the public nor the private sector alone was capable of lifting us back up at the time; it took both. With both working together, amazing things happened.
What we saw 13 years ago was that Joplin has the ability to overcome adversity. That, too, is a lesson not just for us, but one we hope others also take away.
As we've said before, May 22 is not just a day to look back, but also to look side to side, to our left and to our right, and to see once again the best in our neighbors and our community to reaffirm and renew old bonds.
