Neosho native returns to area to report on Joplin tornado

Doug Moore of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch offers a more personal take on the Joplin tornado. Doug, a Neosho native and a former reporter for Missouri Southern State University's newspaper, The Chart, knows the city well and it comes across in his feature:

I stopped at MSSU and pulled into the stadium parking lot, near where a temporary morgue had been set up a few days earlier. It was here, on the football field, where my college commencement was held. I went into the nearby gym, a shelter for 300 or so suddenly homeless from the storm. Beside each of the cots were the few possessions each resident had managed to save. Outside, an elderly woman sat in a wheelchair eating a donated meal. As I left, a large family pulled up in a white minivan. It looked as if it had gone 15 rounds and lost. Most of the windows were blown out. The family was exhausted but relieved.


This campus, now a staging ground to help organize the chaos, is where my first newspaper article was published. It was a review of Madonna's first album. I bravely predicted the dance hall queen would have staying power. A silly thing to think about considering what was going on around me. But it was a memory. Just as this will be.

St. John's Regional Medical Center has become the iconic image of devastation. Photos of the hospital with its blown out windows made their way around the world. The hospital is still standing but in need of intensive care.

I thought of all the people who were clinging to life there when the tornado struck. I thought of my visit there one evening in December 2009 to say goodbye to my grandmother, who died the next day. It makes no sense, but I felt relief she was not there for this awful storm.