If you haven’t seen this documentary, please give it a try. It’s (obviously) about the Joplin tornado of 2011, which killed 158 (or 161*) people, injured hundreds more, destroyed thousands of buildings, and effectively leveled a mile-wide and seven-mile-long stretch of the city. The film follows a handful of people: two groups of then-19-somethings, a kid who graduated high school that day, a closeted queer kid who worked at a yogurt shop, the local meteorologist, and a tourist who had flown into town for, of all things, to meet with the local meteorologist to discuss covering tornados. The first 20-25 minutes move kind of slowly, as it builds tension and tries to get you invested in its characters. But once the tornado hits, at about 25 minutes in, the film is fucking harrowing. Like, I knew what was going to happen, but I was still glued to the edge of my screen, as if I was watching the 90th minute of the World Cup final and USA is up 1-0.
Mrs. H and I lived in Joplin from 1992-1999, so we had been gone for a decade by the time the tornado struck, but of course that town still did (and still does) have a place in our hearts. We knew people who had been affected by it. Places where we had eaten and shopped were destroyed. The place where we lived when we left was nowhere near the destruction, but on a late spring Sunday afternoon we could very well have been in parts of town where it struck, particularly on the city’s central-east side, where there are a lot of businesses and restaurants. Long story short, we could have been among the victims had we still lived there.
A few weeks after it struck, I went with a group to assist with the cleanup efforts (the documentary mentions that some 300,000 volunteers came into and out of the city in the months following). The devastation was indescribable, and so was the smell: rotting food, decaying and moldy wood, rotting pet carcasses. Oof. I overheard one local say at the time “it looks so much better now than it did the day of,” and I was thinking, how much worse could it have looked? In fact, while I was there helping out, I took note of something that came up in the documentary: even though I had lived in that town for years, at certain points I had no idea where I was because there were no landmarks – buildings were leveled, street signs were gone, etc. A character in the film says the same thing - they were trying to get home and they were lost because everything was gone and they had no idea where they were.
Mrs. H and I went to visit last summer, and the parts of town where the tornado hit are completely unlike what I remember. A major hospital is gone, roads on that side of town were rerouted this way and that, and almost all of the construction is brand new. We went to the memorial, at Cunningham Park (which was itself destroyed on that day, and then rebuilt), and the solemnity of the experience was overwhelming.
Anyway, give this film a chance if you’re in the mood for a devastating gut punch.
*158 people died directly from the tornado, another three (including a first responder who got struck by lightning that very afternoon) died of inderect causes. So the death toll is 158 or 161, depending on how you look at it.