The electricity is back on in Missouri’s communities damaged by tornadoes in mid-March, but the trail of destruction will be around for a while.
Federal and state agencies are expected to finish preliminary damage assessments this week on tornadoes that pounded 27 Missouri counties on the night of March 14.
One town hit that night was Rolla in southern Missouri. Rolla City Administrator John Butz told Show Me Today an EF-2 twister came crashing down on his town.
Rolla tornado damage (Photo courtesy of John Butz)
“That first 12 hours was kind of a remarkable all hands on deck emergency response,” said Butz. “And I have to say, miraculously, there was not a singular ambulatory call despite the devastation in Rolla, not a fatality that night, which when you saw the damage on Saturday morning, it was hard to get your mind around.”
Butz said two elementary schools and a middle school were targeted by the twister. Despite the damage, classes resumed Monday at alternative sites.
“It went through a pretty significant corridor of the community,” said Butz. “Hundreds of structures were impacted. Thousands of trees have been impacted. And really, it’s been kind of the repairing of and the clearing of those trees and the debris from the roadways.”
According to Butz, by the end of the first week, more than 4,000 volunteers helped his town to rise above the tornado rubble.
Rolla tornado damage (Photo courtesy of John Butz)
“It’s been quite incredible to witness this recovery,” he said. “We were inundated with people wanting to help immediately. On Saturday, I mean, all through the night, people were just kind of using chainsaws and cutting these paths open on roads. If it weren’t for those volunteers working alongside our public works crews, we would have not been able to open up those roads and be able to get the infrastructure to begin repair.”
He said the outpouring of support has put Rolla in a good position to recover. He encourages people interested in helping to reach out to other communities hit by tornadoes, such as Poplar Bluff.
The night of tornadoes killed at least 12 people in Missouri. In the Rolla area, a man and his dog died a couple days later from carbon monoxide poisoning emitted from running a generator indoors.
At the height of the storm, more than 140,000 Missouri homes and businesses were without power.
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