Rebuilding

Dan Barry has an article in The New York Times about Joplin, Missouri after their tornado:

For the last few nights, brief shimmers of fireworks have sparkled in the dark skies over Joplin, heralding the approach of another national birthday. But the monstrous tornado that mowed through here six weeks ago forced the city to change its Fourth of July plans. That’s right; plans were changed. Monday’s celebration of the Fourth in the partially destroyed city of Joplin will be bigger and louder and better than ever, and will end with an extended display of glittery starbursts designed to brighten the faces of all looking skyward.
There will be ice cream, games, country-western music, inflatable bouncy houses, and fellow Missourian Rush Limbaugh, who will seize the moment to promote an iced tea drink flavored with Tea Party fervor. But there will be no references to the tornado that killed 158 people: no American Red Cross booth; no salespeople for Twister Safe and other tornado-protection products. “We want to have one day without thinking about it,” Beth Peacock, the events manager for the city’s parks, explained. “Tuesday’s going to be here soon enough.”
On Tuesday morning, the street-baking sun will reclaim the sky and cast light once again on a city that is one-third damaged or gone; a city, though, that is working its way toward physical and psychological recovery. Mayor Mike Woolston signaled this communal resolve recently when he ordered that flags be finally raised to full-staff; the time, he said, has come for this city of fifty thousand to focus on the living.
A first-time visitor to Joplin today might gasp at the sight of some of its neighborhoods: the destroyed and vacant houses; the stripped trees; the front steps leading to emptiness; the crushed cars evoking the dead; the many streets that, come eerie nighttime, have no power, no light, no life.
Such is the aftermath of a Force Five tornado that landed and lingered on the evening of 22 May, carving across the city’s belly, carrying winds of more than two hundred miles an hour, changing everything. Dozens were killed, more than seven thousand buildings, including schools, churches, and a hospital, were damaged or destroyed, and a city’s economy was upended. Despair loomed on the stripped horizon.
But to someone who saw the damage early on and has returned several weeks later, Joplin is now a study in tidy devastation, if such a thing is possible, with many swept streets, many raked front yards, and many neat mounds of debris at curbside. For example, where the concrete-and-steel remains of the Elks Lodge once sat, in sad memorial to four dead, there is now a spotless foundation, broom-swept.
Working with various state and federal agencies, particularly the Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the city has followed a plan to clear all obstacles to the re-imagining of its future. With the dead now buried, and the displaced now sheltered, it is focusing on removing the debris, so as to see the possibilities beneath.
Last week, in fact, city officials established a steering committee of civic leaders to explore the opportunities arising from tragedy, the do-overs granted by tornado. Maybe the Main Street sidewalks need to be widened, for example. Maybe this cleared land should be a hiking trail.
Troy Bolander, the city planner, whose work-space walls are decorated with color-coded maps of his transformed city, said that Joplin’s residents would be asked to remove themselves from the here and now, and think long-term: “What would you like to see? What would your kids like to see?”
First, though, the cleanup. Residents and workers and tens of thousands of volunteers from around the country— some just showing up from somewhere else to pitch in— are carrying the debris to the curbs, making sure to create designated piles. Broken tree limbs here, hazardous wastes here, smashed appliances here. Then fleets of trucks are carting loads to various landfills, making so many runs that city officials have issued traffic alerts. More than 350 times a day, for example, trucks rumble down old Route 66 to a landfill in the economically challenged Kansas town of Galena, where stretches of landscape are being redefined by thirty-foot mounds of broken Joplin.
Roger Hines, 62, whose company, Jordan Disposal, operates the landfill, guided his all-terrain vehicle through the hundred-degree heat and up a dusty road to offer a closer look at Joplin belongings involuntarily surrendered. Amid the riot of broken house frames and pieces of porcelain, the tires and sides of walls, can be spotted the occasional personal item. “It makes you sad when you see toys,” Mr. Hines said.
City officials say they have carted off well more than a third of the debris. After that comes the more painful task of demolition. It is one thing to clear away the Elks Lodge, or that old supermarket off Main Street, and quite another when it’s your house, and you think you might, might, be able to save it, but the city disagrees.
In fact, Joplin should not be mistaken for a damaged utopia, where all the people are on their best behavior and in agreement with everything said and done. Joplin is human. Here a sign says “God Bless Joplin,” and there another says: “No Trespassing— We Are Watching.”
City officials are nagging everyone to work as quickly as possible, in part to capitalize on the federal government’s promise to pay for ninety percent of the debris removal, up to 7 August. For safety and planning reasons, they have also halted any rebuilding, in a do-it-yourself part of the country where some think the less to do with government the better. They have also dealt with con artists, scrap-salvaging thieves, and even a couple of area firefighters suspected of looting.
But Mayor Woolston and Mark Rohr, the city manager, dismissed these as minor moments in a community effort they like to call the Miracle of the Human Spirit. Sitting and perspiring in devastated Cunningham Park, listening to a picnic band that used an all-but-destroyed hospital as its backdrop, they spoke with emotion of the more than fifty thousand volunteers and the financial support of strangers, from a check for $100,000 sent by a synagogue in Arizona to a money order for $31.25 from two girls in the Carolinas who sold lemonade for Joplin.
But now, said Mr. Rohr, sitting amid the neatened destruction, “It’s time to resume a normal routine.”
So, on Monday afternoon, Joplin will relax awhile in the heat of Landreth Park. Its thousands will eat hot dogs, and drink iced tea packaged as patriotism, and sing along to old, familiar songs. Then will come the pulse-racing fireworks, rain or shine.