Ear Popping and Hair Raising in the Operating Room

What do you do if you’re in the operating room, May 22 at 5:41, working on a patient at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Joplin, Missouri, when an F4 tornado hits your town?

A view of the devastated interior of St. John’s Regional Medical Center, Joplin, MO. More pictures here.

This seems like a stupidly outrageous question. It probably wouldn’t even work as fiction, let alone reality. Except, it happened, an event that answers the outrageous question. Of all the incredible tornado stories to come out of the month-long super tornadoes outbreak, this story stands out, even in the large field of stories of heroism and amazing survival.

As a resident of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which suffered an almost identical day a month ago, April 27, this story is hair-raising and made more so by the fact this all happened to a close friend’s son.

Dr. Dusty Smith, son of Dr. Jay Smith, a dermatologist in Montgomery, Alabama, is an orthopedic surgeon in Joplin. That infamous day, Dusty was performing emergency surgery when St. John’s took a direct hit moments after a staff member said, “My ears are popping.”

Here’s the rest of the story.

This amazing story has lots of facets, some obvious, some less so. But it reminds me the heroic effort that airline pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger made in landing his disabled U.S. Airways airliner into the Hudson River in New York, saving every one of the crew and passengers. A modest man, he credits his experience and training in keeping his cool under such pressure.

Dusty has a few words about the value of good training.

If I could tell the residents of Joplin one thing, it would be that driving through all the devastation even a month later is very hard, very anxiety-ridden, even depressing. I think it will be like this for a long, long time

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Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Shocking Vistas

So, what’s next for our city ravaged by the April 27, 2011, Mutant Tornado.

That’s easy: Disaster relief, disaster relief, disaster relief.

Once the National Guard began to open up the hardest hit areas of the city, I went to sites to shoot video; I wasn’t sure why at the time. Now I think it was for two reasons: catharsis and the need to appeal – for some time to come – for disaster relief.

I interviewed several survivors along Crescent Ridge Road and Holt, arguably the hardest hit. Until I went to shoot video, and even though I had been using that road for decades, I had no idea the reason for the name of the road. Almost immediately, the question was answered. Once the Mutant Tornado went through and took almost everything, shocking vistas opened up.

I was standing on a ridge. From that ridge I could see for miles and miles, southwest over devastated Alberta City toward town until the hospital and football stadium finally blocked the view; and northeast all the way over Brookwood to Jim Walter Mine #7, according to one survivor, 35 miles away, until the next ridge blocked the view.

Christmas Future

Tuscaloosa will need all the help it can get for the long haul. The amount of debris, closely equivalent to the amount of debris left at the site of the World Trade Center after the 9/11 terrorist attack, tells the story. (See the previous post.)

The 5,000 – 7,000 damaged or destroyed structures in the city tell the story. Many, many people are in dire need of the most fundamental supplies – food, shelter, clothes, school supplies, children’s toys, hygiene products – name it.

This need for the most basic supplies will continue well into the future. The clean-up is likely to take a year. Who knows how and when structures and housing will be rebuilt.

Too soon the need will be for Christmas presents for Tuscaloosa’s displaced children.

The Odor

Finally, it was the odor, the stench, on the ridge that drove home to me the extent of the devastation. As far as I know, by the time I shot video (about five days after the tornado), all the human bodies had been found and retrieved, but there could easily have been remains of people whom no one knew to report as missing. The odor was certainly the animals and pets that were killed and covered up by debris.

It was not rotting food. Rotting food alone (which I admit I’ve had in my refrigerator from time to time) does not smell like that. It was bodies.

Hints

When I turned onto Crescent Ridge, the scene only hinted at what was to come: broken tree limbs, trees with too few leaves, entire oak trees that have been sawed and piled on the side of the road, twisted road signs, mail boxes in yards, homes with odd lettering and numbering spray-painted on the front, huge root balls of trees sucked up from the ground. Then damaged structures and blue tarps.

Survivors tell their stories about the April 27, 2011 Tuscaloosa tornado

Then the shocking vistas where people and their lives had been. Then some survivors -- the few who were able to stay in their damaged homes or a small number of people standing dazed on what used to be their property.

Then I met one man, who pointed out Jim Walter Mine #7 in the far distance, some family members, and a mother dog with about five puppies; they are living under an open-type tent and in his storm shelter, about 12-feet below ground, which saved their lives. There was nothing left on the cement slab that was his front porch, living room, and house. They were cooking on a grill.

For some distance, there was a strange stillness up there, broken only by birds’ chirpings and songs. Then As I neared the area of a direct hit, I began to hear all the heavy equipment working to bulldoze or pick up debris into piles of like materials. Cars and trucks, drain gutters, bikes and other metal stuff in a pile. Tires and man-made materials in piles. Pieces of wood and housing materials in a pile. Huge tree trunks and large branches in a pile. Root balls in a pile. Unidentifiable stuff in piles. Ice cream and popsicle trucks. Toys. What was left of swimming pools, filled with trees and belongings. Lone cement stair steps leading to nothing.

I saw this for miles until the scene became countryside with an odd wide path cut out where whole forests had been standing five days before.

Finally the remains of my favorite gardening nursery. And then Holt Elementary School. All gone.

Disaster Relief

Tuscaloosa will need all the help it can get for the long haul. And frankly, the best, most needed, donation is good ole MONEY. Following are some agencies, churches, and places where donations and money can be made, and there are many more besides these.

Agencies and Organizations

The United Way of West Alabama disaster donations

The Salvation Army of Tuscaloosa, and here, disaster relief; 1-800-SAL-ARMY

The Red Cross of Tuscaloosa, Disaster Online Newsroom; 1-800-REDCROSS

Tuscaloosa Disaster Relief Fund

Tuscaloosa Emergency Services, 205-758-5535

Samaritan’s Purse

West Alabama Chamber Foundation, which you can donate to through Joe Namath’s “Broadway Joe” site.

Aid for Tuscaloosa’s three elementary schools destroyed by the tornado

Catholic Social Services Tuscaloosa, 205-759-0168

Churches

St. Mark United Methodist Church, 2605 Skyland Blvd. E., 205-553-4929

Hargrove Road Memorial United Methodist Church, 1812 Hargrove Rd. E., 205-553-7271

Woodland Forrest Baptist Church, 6701 Hargrove Rd. E., 205-553-1494

Church of the Nazarene, Hillcrest, 340 Patriot Pkwy., 205-758-3297

I will post these disaster relief agencies and sites on and off on Spittin’ Grits for months to come. It’s what I can do for my city.

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Tornado Morphing

Tornadoes don’t have names, as Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Pacific hurricanes do. April 27, 2011, probably explains why: There aren’t enough names, and names are too nice for tornadoes of that magnitude. That day, in Alabama alone, at least 38 twisters ripped up more than 1,000 miles of cities, towns, and countryside, killing nearly 240 people and countless animals; injuries are in the thousands. The state isn’t even 1,000 miles long.

But I have a name for the monster that devastated Tuscaloosa – Mutant.

Images of the mutant thing abound. Just search “Tuscaloosa tornado.”

Even from its inception southwest of the Tuscaloosa city limits, it was almost a mile wide; it had tentacles; it swallowed another twister or two to enlarge itself. Structures and things in its path that should have impacted its momentum seemed to feed it. It was a singular presence, without the usual rain wall or extended blackness to disguise it. The countryside forests and woods, the cityscape, the green spaces – none of these hid it from view. It just kept coming and coming and coming. Television meteorologists lost their composure and were all but screaming for everyone to take cover.

The world saw the images of the Mutant’s destruction for days afterwards. President Obama, as well as some entertainers, came in person. Obama’s shock was visible. “I’ve got to say, I've never seen destruction like this,” he said.

The Mutant directly and significantly affected about a quarter of the city’s residents. It destroyed or severely damaged at least 5,000 buildings in the city. Ironically, it destroyed Tuscaloosa’s Emergency Operations Center, as well as the Salvation Army building, Red Cross building, police station and fire station buildings and vehicles, the city’s garbage trucks, a water treatment operation, several schools, and on and on and on. The clean-up will likely cost more than $100 million.

The emotional toll is not countable.

Normal Destruction

All this is simply numbers. Here’s another: It has created somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million cubic yards of debris.

Who, other than experts, knew that debris is measured in cubic yards or in tons? Ordinarily, who cares? Certainly not me. So I tried to get some perspective on this kind of meaningless number.

First, our Tax Day Tornado less than two weeks earlier, which I reported in the April 20 post, created about 15,000 cubic yards of debris. That one was sort of a normal tornado, so that otherwise meaningless number may be kind of “normal” for tornadoes. Frankly, those numbers still didn’t really mean anything.

So I tried to find out how many cubic yards of debris were created from the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and from hurricane Katrina 2005. What I found was likely “ballpark” figures, as totals were different in different sources.

Mutant Destruction

Many of us remember the images. From those memories, we can make meaningless numbers more real.

One report: “Even though it was a terrible site, the P&J team didn’t feel the effort would be insurmountable. They estimated that Ground Zero looked to have about a million cubic yards of debris; we had handled four times that much following Hurricane Andrew.”

Another: “By comparison, the disaster debris generated after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City was approximately 1.4 million tons (2.8 million CY).”

Finally: “He cut short critics of the slow hurricane relief effort by offering statistics on the magnitude of the disaster. While the destruction of the World Trade Center created 1 million cubic yards of debris in New York, he said, hurricanes Katrina and Rita created 45 million cubic yards of debris in Mississippi alone.”

These numbers tell us that the Tuscaloosa debris is comparable to the debris from the destroyed World Trade Center. Discovering this was shocking.

For several reasons, I spent time, after the National Guard opened the worst affected areas, shooting video, some of which I will edit and put on YouTube. What I saw and what survivors told me was emotionally draining. I will deal with their stories in upcoming posts.

Suffice it to say right now that the Mutant did one more thing besides destroying and killing: it created new and shocking vistas. All that debris used to be something; it’s now gone, leaving huge open spaces where people, pets, trees, gardens, vehicles, swimming pools, and ordinary life used to be.

 

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