Half the schools were severely damaged, and many of the teachers and students were homeless. Huff, and the goal he set was a tough one. VICKY MIESELER: The best thing that happened to us is when the school superintendent said, we're going back to school in August. But of all the good ideas following the tornado, Vicky Mieseler, executive director at Ozark Center, a group of mental health clinics in Joplin, says one stands out like a light at the end of a tunnel. Peer-on-peer support that Walker says he's used to get disaster victims talking from Florida to Fukushima. And I'm like, you just managed to put together a peer-on-peer support that really has never been done before. WALKER: And a lightbulb went off in my head. He says a Joplin focus group hit on a simple question that opens up informal therapy. MORRIS: Walker had a list of five things to check on - work, relationships, play, sleep and consumption of food, drugs and alcohol. You know, Joe Smith needs you down the way. When he got to Joplin, he found residents reluctant to talk about their feelings.ĭOUG WALKER: When you asked someone, how are you doing? They'd say, I'm fine I'm good. Doug Walker is a clinical psychologist from New Orleans who travels the world helping communities struck by disaster. MORRIS: And that goes for average citizens, too. STAMMER: But all of a sudden, when all of you or many of you are having psychological problems, emotional problems with this, you become much more empathetic. Stammer says the old model was to just suck it up. He says that the tornado also forced a cultural change in the way that first responders deal with post-traumatic stress. MORRIS: So planners like Stammer are now gaming out bigger and more complex disasters.
KEITH STAMMER: If I had walked into a disaster planning committee meeting with a scenario in my back pocket that basically wiped out a third of Joplin and caused us to not be able to help ourselves from the get-go, I'd have been laughed out of the meeting.
The tornado forced officials, like Joplin's emergency management director, Keith Stammer, to think big. And it's not just houses that are better prepared. He says new homes going up here now use more steel to secure roofs to walls and walls to foundations following national standards established after the Joplin tornado. MORRIS: Bryan Wicklund is Joplin's chief building official. Frank Morris of member station KCUR reports.įRANK MORRIS, BYLINE: An enormous tornado with winds topping 200 miles an hour turned Joplin, Mo., into a case study on building failure.īRYAN WICKLUND: I remember after the tornado, we had one home just a few blocks from here that was actually sitting in the middle of the road upside down. An EF5 tornado took out a third of Joplin a decade ago, and the lessons learned since then have been applied to disasters around the world. As Mayfield, Ky., and other areas hit by this month's tornado outbreak try to rebuild, Joplin, Mo., offers some insights.
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