On May 26, 2011 at 8:06am -0700, DAVE WALDEN
Written
by a maintenance guy from Freeman Hospital..
ok everybody. here we go..
what a ride it has been. I just woke up from crashing finally.. I was at
work at Freeman hospital when the tornado hit. I was the ONLY mantanaince
man on the evening shift. the alert sounded. said it was a warning
for carl junction which is 10 miles north of where we were. I started all
the generators. 10 of them. just in case... when the storm hit
we did not realize what had happened only 1/4 north of us at St
Johns. not until the caravans of people started coming in. St
Johns took a direct hit. blew out all the windows, then had a gas leak and
an explosion. the tornado was about 8 blocks wide and went through
Joplin. west to east.. never left the ground. residential...
business... residential... main business.. residential. we had people
coming in pickups with wounded.. cars with all the windows blown out.
people on boards, doors, tables. we emptied 4 conference rooms of the
rolling chairs .. about 100.. to use as wheel chairs. we had 4 triage
areas going full blast. one at each entrance. people were lined up
for 10 blocks or more just to get to our driveways. we had just gone
through an earthquake drill last week, so every one knew their supplies
were. it was calm chaos. hundreds of wounded, covered in
blankets, sitting in chairs, lying on the floor in rows. blood every
where.. new chairs coming now for sure.... the nurses and doctors were
great. our phones were out instantly... the cell towers were inundated,
couldn't get out.. we couldn't call for reinforcements.. they just started
showing up. from every where.. emt's, nurses, doctors, local and even from
out of town. the few in the kitchen started making sandwiches, we
brought out all the blankets we had, brought up rolling supply carts of
bandages, cases of bottled water. formed small groups of volunteers to
manage traffic so the ambulances could get in and out. school buses of
injured started coming it. truckers were bringing in semi loads of
injured. no lights in joplin, we have a six story tower and all you could
see were blue and red lights everywhere. I personally took the 1st six
bodies and started a temporary morgue. The stories people were telling
were beyond belief... we had probably 10 or 12 dogs running somewhat loose in
the hospital that people had brought in with them. smoking in the hospital
on a no smoking campus. cries of pain, sorrow and yes even joy when people would
find loved ones.
The situation in town is way WORSE than you see on
tv. I came home in the dark and did not know where I was because of the
destruction, untill I came to a round about in the road and realized I had gone
a mile too far. I couldn't get through to Sandy on the phones and people
started coming in from the area I lived in with horror stories of total
destruction. the home depot you see on tv is just blocks from us...
finally another employee came in and said his mom was ok. and she just
lives two blocks from us. the tornado just missed my son by two blocks as
well. My daughter in law is a therapist and has no office building to go
to anymore. her father is a dentist who has no office building to go to
anymore.
Joplin will take years to rebuild. kinda like the twin
towers. you can actually see all the way through town, end to end.
the high school is gone. a major business street, going east and west on
the east of town is flat on both sides of the street for two miles.
nothing left standing. thousands of people have lost their homes, and
their possessions, AND their income because their places of employment
have vanished off the map.
on the other hand, THANK THE LORD, I have my
home, my possesions and my job. I never had to serve in combat, but surely
this has to be somewhat similar in relation of chaos. I kinda know what
the Japanese must feel like after the sunami now. yes I know some of
the dead in joplin personally.
Freeman hospital still looks kinda
like it did that night. we still have STUFF everywhere. the floor is
still dirty because joplin has virtually no water pressure. we barely have
enough water to run our sterilzers for instruments. only two
bathrooms work in the hospital.. don't know whey they do... the water company
has SO MANY broken pipes in houses that are gone, that they can't get the
pressure to come up. a large area of the roof blew off and the rain
collected and ran down inbetween the layers of roofing and into the areas full
of pipes and wires and is still dripping and of course the rain won't stop so we
can fix the roof. we have buckets all over the halls and even have a
couple of areas of rooms we can't even use because the water keeps coming out of
the ceiling area. we have removed hundreds of ceiling tiles that have
gotten wet and were coming down anyway. the fire alarms keep going off all
the time because the wiring system is getting wetter and wetter with all
the leaks. we have to check each alarm to make sure there is no fire and
then silence it.
PLEASE PRAY FOR US. A LOT OF PEOPLE'S LIVES ARE
CHANGED FOREVER.
MINE IS. AND I AM ALRIGHT. THANKS FOR ALL THE
CALLS, SORRY THE PHONES STILL DON'T WORK VERY WELL. WE ARE ON A CURFEW
DUSK TO DAWN WITH NATIONAL GUARD AT HUNDREDS OF INTERSECTIONS. A 15 MINUTE
DRIVE TO HOME TOOK ME AN HOUR. ONLY MY FREEMAN BADGE LET ME
THROUGH. MAYBE I WILL WRITE MORE LATER. NOW I'M GOING BACK TO
SLEEP. JOHN
HE NEVER SAID IT WOULD BE EASY... HE JUST SAID FOLLOW
ME
This is why we prepare! NoStressMike.com
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