Joplin Wal-Mart customer service manager's early stormchasing training comes in handy

The Wall Street Journal profiles another hero of the Joplin tornado, 19-year-old Wal-Mart customer service manager Cameron Paul, whose father was a stormchaser, put what he had learned to good use during the Joplin tornado Sunday night:

The tornado passed. Huge chunks of hail began to fall. Looking up, Mr. Paul saw a woman clutching a child near a shopping cart. He called them over and stood, holding one end of the broken piece of roof, so they could crouch beneath it. He held a milk crate over his own head to protect himself from the hail.

“At the point when the hail was hitting, I couldn’t stop laughing,” he said. “Just knowing that the hell that passed over us, the tornado, was gone and I had actually somehow made it. When I saw it rip off the front doors, I thought, this is where we’re all going to die.”

When the hail was over, Mr. Paul, whose father had been an Army medic, and a co-worker pulled injured people out of the debris. They handed out gauze and bandages from first-aid kits that had flown off the pharmacy shelves.

One woman had a gash on her arm so deep they could see the bone. Mr. Paul found a rag and told her to apply pressure. The woman objected, saying the rag was dirty. “We’re all going to be getting tetanus shots,” Mr. Paul told her. The area reeked of propane and natural gas.

Amid the wreckage stood a dog, unhurt. No one knew how it had gotten there, and a few minutes later, it disappeared.

Several customers appeared to have broken backs, including a woman with three children. Mr. Paul and his co-workers carefully placed blankets around the injured adults. Another Walmart employee wrapped trash bags around the children to keep them warm.

Mr. Paul checked the pulse of a man lying on the floor, then put a comforter over him so the children wouldn’t see. But as Mr. Paul led a boy out of the store, the child said, “There’s a dead guy over there.”

It took an hour to get everyone out. Mr. Paul was one of the last to leave. He picked up one of the unopened cans of Pepsi that littered the ground around him. “That was the best soda I ever had in my life,” he says. He handed the register keys to his manager and told him he wouldn’t be coming into work the next day. They both laughed.