U.S.
Ryan Schuessler
JOPLIN, Mo. — May 22, 2011, is a day Anita Leyba will never forget.
That evening, this town on the southwestern edge of Missouri took a direct hit from a mile-wide, multiple-vortex EF5 tornado. Anita and her husband took shelter in their apartment. She recalled hearing the building being ripped apart around her.
“I have never been so afraid in my life,” she said. “I screamed, I cried, I prayed. You could hear the timber cracking.
“It just got worse, and worse, and worse.”
The Leybas’ entire building was reduced to rubble. When the storm passed, they pulled themselves out of the debris and saw a shadow of what was once their city. Anita remembers the first thing she noticed: the trees, stripped bare of branches, leaves, and bark. She recalled the piles of rubble — desolation for as far as she could see, in every direction.
She paused.
“We lost eight people in our apartment building,” she said softly.
Anita and her husband were lucky to have walked away. The Joplin tornado killed 161 people and injured 1,150 more, destroying miles of the city, including the high school and hospital. It was the deadliest tornado since the 1940s, and the seventh deadliest in recorded history. The Leybas were in the center of the devastation, left with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
But a church in nearby Carthage soon helped the Leybas and hundreds of others who lost everything in Joplin to start putting their lives back together with one simple thing: photos.
In the hours, days, weeks, months and years after the tornado, volunteers organized by First Baptist Church in Carthage have been collecting pictures picked up by the storm and, in some cases, carried hundreds of miles away.
Their mission: to return the nearly 40,000 photos found to the families they belong to.
“I can’t tell you how I felt to get that picture,” Anita said as she recounted the drive to pick up a singular picture of her grandson that had turned up on a farm about 20 miles away. “I was almost in tears.”
That’s the kind of story that keeps Thad Beeler, the music minister at First Baptist, going. He remembers the night of the tornado well. He was at choir practice when the sirens went off. Everyone moved downstairs but didn’t think much of it. Tornadoes are a fact of life in this part of the country.
“That night, we had a man run in,” Beeler recalled. “He was screaming that the entire city of Joplin was gone.”
That’s what Debby Chattelier thought when she and her husband emerged from their basement, covered in mud, sewage, and tar. Their home had been torn apart by the wind.
“People were just walking around like zombies,” she said. “Some people were screaming. There was a house on fire two blocks away.”
Chattelier recalled feeling the suction of the storm as her husband lay on top of her, holding on to a support beam. When she opened her eyes, her glasses had been torn from her face. The things she had in her pockets were gone, replaced with debris. They found her daughter’s car at the top of a tree blocks away with massive gashes in it.
“It looked like we had been bombed,” she said.
In the days following the tornado, stories emerged that illustrated how horrifying the power of the storm had been. Hospital patients had been sucked out of their beds and out of the windows. Entire stores disintegrated while people huddled inside. Some victims could never be identified.
The story of a teenager who had graduated from high school that same day particularly stands out. He and his father had been driving home when they were caught in the tornado. The storm took him out of his car seat and through the sunroof. The boy’s father dislocated his shoulder trying to hold on to him.
“You can’t separate Joplin from the tornado,” Beeler said. “You can’t separate the tornado from Joplin.”
Since then, Beeler has been at the helm of this project, which has been dubbed the “Lost Photos of Joplin.” He’s overseen hundreds of volunteers who have spent thousands of hours collecting, cleaning, cataloguing and scanning each photo found. There are public viewings of the photos for people to come and try to find the images they lost, as well as a website with every image that has been turned in.
The thousands of photos catalogued by volunteers represent the history of this historic Route 66 town, now sitting in a dozen or so cardboard boxes.
There are lithographs of ancestors from the 1800s, black-and-white photos from World War II, family vacation memories, baby photos, school pictures, big-haired prom shots from the 1980s, Polaroids from Christmas morning, developed film from school plays — there are even a few that made some of the women of the church blush, Beeler said with a laugh.
The rest of Joplin’s photos have since been moved from First Baptist in Carthage to the Joplin Museum Complex, where they will be permanently stored. Beeler considers what his group has done a success, even though tens of thousands of photos remain unclaimed. He knows some people may not even be aware of the project, and that it may be too painful for some to come collect photos of their lives from before the tornado.
He knows some of the pictures are of people who died in the storm, and will never be claimed.
“This is where the faith-based community needs to be involved,” Beeler said. “There is no one who understands the circle of life better than churches, synagogues ...”
Three years later, the work is just getting started, even though the Joplin project is winding down. Beeler is working to make sure that what his team did in Joplin can be replicated across the country, be it in the wake of a tornado, hurricane, earthquake or other disaster.
“I hope no community goes through what we’ve gone through, but I know there will be,” he said. “This is something that affects every corner of the U.S., and it’s not just tornadoes.”
The “Lost Photos of Joplin” project has morphed into an organization called National Disaster Photo Rescue, and has responded to disasters in several states, including the recent deadly outbreak of tornadoes in Arkansas and Mississippi.
Beeler and his team are working to put together a manual on this process that he hopes local faith groups and civic organizations can use to quickly organize an effort similar to what his church did in Joplin at a moment’s notice. He said it was important that community organizations take the lead. There have been stories of individuals demanding money for photos they find in the wake of disasters.
“You don’t have this kind of disaster and not do something,” Beeler said. “It’s inherently what people in the church do.”
Bands of volunteers organized by National Disaster Photo Rescue, largely on social media, are responding in the wake of disasters to collect photos. The Leybas were a couple of the volunteers who scoured Baxter Springs, Kansas, for photos after a tornado tore through that town and nearby Quapaw, Oklahoma, in late April.
“It was hard to see,” Leyba said. “When we drove in, I had tears in my eyes.”
Leyba said that after having been reunited with photos of her own, she wanted to give back, knowing how much moments like that can mean for someone who has lost everything.
“It’s the little bit that we could do,” she said. “If that makes somebody happy, then it was worth it.”
In Joplin alone, the project has returned approximately 18,000 photos to more than 700 families at more than 60 reunification events, where bulletin boards and binders of returned photos are available for public viewing.
“It’s changed people’s lives. It’s hard to accept that in a way,” Beeler said. “The life-changers are supposed to be the doctors, the scientists, engineers, the government, I guess. To see the effect this has had on people — it is overwhelming.
“We have been able to help put back their lives, even if it’s just a few pictures.”
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