The Big Job of Cleaning up Joplin Missouri
posted on 24 July 2011 | posted in
Construction and Industrial
On May 22nd, 2011 our town was hit by an EF 6 tornado, previously classified as an EF 5, they had to revise the scale to incorporate the record breaking winds that our tornado produced. After walking out from my families barely standing shell of a house we were astounded to see the damage caused.
I'd done my fair share of dirty and dangerous jobs in the past - from tank cleaning to road mending, but I knew this would be the job of all jobs to somehow get this town back to anything like the way it was.
Where once we had seen trees, we saw stripped trunks. Where once we saw East Middle school, finished two summers previously, we saw a tangle of metal beams that had been the gym. Our neighborhood was toast. Plain and simple. Our house, and older one built of stone, was the only one visible in the now flat landscape. The entire surrounding landscape was debris. Shingles, wood, mattresses, insulation, sheet metal and some lucky skeletons of houses. Cars were barely recognizable. Cleanup and search and rescue started that evening. For the first couple days we were attempting to save personal items. My room was never found. After a couple days of rainy weather and minimal cleanup. We started the real chore. Debris removal. We had five piles. Wood, shingles, trash, insulation and sheet metal. Temperatures reached 95 degrees. At this moment today it has almost been two months. We still work daily in our yard and "house". Press releases from our city say that if one dump truck leaves every 3 minutes 24/7 then it will take an estimated four months to remove the majority of debris from our city.
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